Music of the Spheres

New Song: The Play's The Same

2012-01-29T13:56:00.000-05:00

Last week I recorded another song for my new album project. "The Play's the Same" is about refusing to grow up. Jethro Tull had an album called "Too Old To Rock 'N' Roll (Too Young To Die)." But how can you be too old to rock 'n' roll? I love Roger's lead guitar parts on this tune. Here's a rough mix:

Insanely Great Music Apps

2012-01-28T23:50:00.000-05:00

Music making apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch keep getting better. In the last few weeks I've gotten several new ones that really raise the bar (all available on iTunes):

Music Studio 2.0 - This seems to be the most full-featured iOS "DAW" right now, integrating audio and MIDI recording like a mini version of Sonar X1 (though still not nearly as full-featured). The audio recording is new in the recent 2.0 version. At about $14, this is one of the more expensive apps I have ever bought, but for what it can do, it's quite a bargain. The MIDI instrument samples are not fantastic quality (file size for one thing - as it is this is a 300+ MB app), but they sound pretty good through headphones, and you can always export the MIDI (and WAV) tracks for further work on PC or Mac-based recording software.

Strumstage - This is the most naturally playable guitar app yet (although iShred and Guitar Studio are close). The key here is that there are only three large "frets" that are used to choose from a palette of seven pre-selected chords (there are pre-defined palettes, plus you can define your own). Since it's easy to finger the chords, you can concentrate on strumming or picking. Take a look at this video to see what I mean. It also has drum and bass backing parts you can choose from a small list (the bass parts key off the chords you are playing). You can spend another couple of dollars and download additional guitars and rhythm kits inside the app.

Animoog - From the makers of classic Moog synthesizers, this app creates some amazing sounds and is almost infinitely controllable. Check out the demo video (makes me wish I had an iPad but it works fine on my new fourth generation iPod Touch). This is a $30 app which I got for 99 cents during its 30 day introductory period. Check out the demo videos on this page.

Ah yes, that new iPod. That has really increased the average cost of these apps. But (rationalization alert!) I had been wanting to get a new iPod Touch for at least a year - higher res display, faster processor, more memory (64 GB), cameras, and especially a built-in microphone. Just being able to record a song idea without having to find and plug in an external microphone is a major advantage. I also bought a new attachment called iRig MIDI which allows me to connect the iPod to a MIDI keyboard or to the MIDI interface on my PC. This works with Music Studio, Animoog, Thumbjam, and many other music apps that support the "Core MIDI" standard on iOS.

Every one of these tools (ok, toys) has at least one song hidden in it, waiting for me to carve it out, like a statue from a block of marble (often the "statue" just looks like a smaller block of marble). I haven't given up on real instruments either. Last week I received a Rover mandolin that I ordered as a Black Friday deal on Amazon for $83 (it was out of stock for two months). It's clearly a starter instrument, but it sounds OK and is surprisingly playable. I've already got two new songs in work based on the five chords I've learned so far.

Songs I Wish I Wrote

2012-01-23T08:46:00.000-05:00

As a songwriter, there are many writers I admire and a lot of songs I've heard and said to myself, "I wish I wrote that." I just found a list I started some years ago. I hate top 10 lists, so here's more or less my top 13, excluding Beatles songs of which there are many I wish I wrote (yes, even "Get Back"). Not exactly in order, and I'm sure I've missed some obvious favorites. But I would have been happy to have written any of these songs.When I used to do gigs, my wife thought for years that I wrote "To Make You Feel My Love" and a couple of John Mayer songs. But I owned up and gave credit to Bob and John.

Something So Right (Paul Simon)
More Than You Know (Billy Rose)
Let’s Stay Together (Al Green, Al Jackson Jr., Willie Mitchell)
Your Song (Elton John-Bernie Taupin)
To Make You Feel My Love (Bob Dylan)
Stop This Train (John Mayer)
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight (James Taylor)
Marie (Randy Newman)
America (Paul Simon)
Wild Horses (Mick Jagger-Keith Richard)
Crazy Love (Van Morrison)
Take It Easy (Jackson Browne, Glenn Frey)
Winning the Battle, Losing the War (Kings of Convenience)

While I aspire to writing the smart love song (see: Paul Simon), I can see I have a soft spot for the sappy love song too. Oh well.

You Have To Laugh...

2012-01-11T16:36:00.000-05:00

I'm trying to not pay much attention to politics this early in 2012, but the many antics of the Republican presidential candidates are just too much like a car crash - you don't want to look, but you can't help it. There are two guys who spin this stuff with all the decorum and hilarity it deserves: Andy Borowitz with The Borowitz Report, and Matt Bors with his amazing political comics and blog posts. Laughing is better than crying.

New Year, New Music

2012-01-02T17:40:00.001-05:00

Happy new year to all! For me, 2011 was a good year for the most part. I visited my daughter in Paris in March (among many other travels). I learned to land a tail wheel airplane (to be continued come spring, I hope). I made progress in learning to work at a large company (after my small company was acquired in fall of 2010). And I started to get back into songwriting and recording, with a big assist from music apps on my iPod Touch. Music apps allow me to use time on long overseas flights and weekends between countries to get some songwriting done.

Songwriting and recording make me happy, especially when I work on the recording with Roger Lavallee, producer and instrumentalist par excellence. I spent a few hours with Roger at the Tremolo Lounge this past week recording two songs "nearly final" and starting on a third. These are brand new songs, the two nearly-final ones written in December, inspired in part by the Black Keys. As a result these are probably the most rocking tracks I have ever done (thanks be to Roger who played all the instruments - I just sang and made comments on the arrangements, solos, mixes, etc.). You can listen to the (fairly smooth) "rough mixes" on SoundCloud if you like:

Lady Heartache (rough mix v3) by FlyingSinger

Down and Out (rough mix) by FlyingSinger

2012 will include a LOT of business travel, so I'm glad I've figured out how to write songs and make rough demos with my iPod on the road. 2012 will also include a new album, probably by summer or early fall, with a mix of new and old songs (or maybe all new if my writing streak holds up) and maybe half rock and half acoustic/ countryish/ jazzy/ whatever (i.e., my usual eclectic non-style). I plan to record some songs on my new recording gear at home, but I'll probably end up doing most of it with Roger.

And what about space and astronomy? I hope to find time to read, write, and simulate more in 2012. So many interesting things and so little time!

Great Model Airplane Video

2011-12-21T09:07:00.000-05:00

I just learned that a fellow optical professional in Europe has a cool hobby - shooting HD video from a RC model airplane flying above the beautiful scenery of Switzerland. Although I have known him for some years through my visits to his company, I never knew about the RC flying. Since I'm interested in pretty much anything involving flying, I thought this was just great and wanted to share it.

The above image is a screen shot from this video. The prop is stopped and folded through most of this video (it's essentially an RC motor glider), but the engine is briefly started during the turn to final approach and landing at about 3:10. This video is also great (you can see the prop stop and fold at about 0:18). Some others are here.

Back in the Shuttle Again

2011-12-16T23:40:00.002-05:00

Version 2.2 of the amazing iOS app f-sim space shuttle is available at the iTunes store. There is now a beautiful animation of the drag chute's deployment and release after you touch down (visible in the external views, normally seen in replays after you land, though I suppose you could land in the external view). The replay views are great, especially when you've done a decent landing. There is also an optional "windows in the sky" landing aid that I find more distracting than helpful (but it is probably helpful when you are first learning to land with the HUD visual cues). Excellent app. There is also an official video available here.

Update: The "visual approach path" (windows in the sky) is more useful than I thought. Up to now I've mostly done final approaches rather than the full "HAC" approaches which I was never very good at. But with the visual approach aid, full HAC approaches make much more sense, and I was successful on my first two tries. Now I can see what the HUD cues were trying to tell me. This app has amazing replay value (assuming you are a space and flight sim nerd like me).

The Black Keys!!?!

2011-12-15T15:54:00.000-05:00

Why didn't I get the memo? The Black Keys have been around since 2001, and I never noticed them until last week when I happened to buy the current issue of American Songwriter Magazine with them on the cover. Two guys from Akron who make a whole lot of great music with basically drums, guitar, and vocals. I previewed and bought the two most recent albums, Brothers (2010) and El Camino (released this month). Damn, these guys are good. They definitely have a strong blues persuasion but they bend the blues every which way in their infectious (in a good way), hard-driving songs. Great writing, great playing. Sometimes they remind me of Cream (a sixties favorite), but their sound is definitely their own. Check out the videos for "Lonely Boy" (imagine the huge investment in making this video!) and the action-packed and hilarious "Howlin' For You" (truly a big budget video). Great stuff! Man, I gotta write me some new blues-rock songs (trying to get in the mood there).

Stratolaunch: Too Cool

2011-12-14T15:59:00.002-05:00

And here I was thinking Burt Rutan had retired.

I just heard about this and watched the simulation video. The concept is to scale Burt's "White Knight" carrier/launch aircraft to super-jumbo size (six 747 engines) to provide a runway-launched "first stage" (Scaled Composites) for a large orbital booster (SpaceX) for cargo or people (using the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft). Stratolaunch is a Paul Allen project with commercial operation projected for 2016. Of course nothing is flying yet, but private space looks to have a few tricks up its sleeve for the coming years.

Exploring Space With Your Computer (Again)

2011-12-13T11:17:00.000-05:00

In April 2009, I contributed to the International Year of Astronomy daily podcast series with a podcast called "Exploring Space With Your Computer." It featured audio dramatizations of a mission to Europa and the final seconds of the Apollo 11 moon landing, as simulated in the free Orbiter spaceflight simulator. It also discussed the free planetarium program Stellarium and a few other free tools for exploring space from the comfort of your computer keyboard. I used sound effects from Orbiter and also wrote and recorded a spacey-sounding musical soundtrack for the podcast. It was fun to do.

The daily astronomy podcast program has continued beyond 2009, and today "Exploring Space With Your Computer" is being featured as a "classic" thanks to someone's unexpected cancellation. It's nice to be featured, even as a rerun. I posted a set of Orbiter screenshots illustrating my simulated space adventures on Flickr. You can read more about the podcast (including web links) in this 2009 blog post. The podcast series is continuing into 2012 - maybe I'll even find time to do a new podcast next year.

Basement Tapes (But No Tapes)

2011-12-04T22:03:00.001-05:00

I've been "gearing up" (quite literally) to get back into music recording. I started with powerful new "gaming" laptop and Cakewalk Sonar X1 (recently upgraded to the full Producer Edition with a $99 holiday special). I added a new monitor, a new MIDI keyboard (Oxygen 49), a USB digital audio interface, a new electric guitar (a cheap Epiphone that still plays pretty well), and a mandolin that hasn't arrived yet. With all the soft synths and guitar processing bundled with Sonar, cheap input devices like the Oxygen 49 and the Epiphone "Les Paul Junior" can sound like just about anything (just add inspiration and talent - that's the tough part). I've set all of this up in my own little corner of the basement, as shown above (see if you can spot the paint cans under the desk). I had some of the equipment (microphones, preamps, tambourine, various acoustic guitars, a zillion cables) from my previous recording setup. That was based on a circa-2002 XP desktop and Sonar 3. Major upgrade time.

This is an embarrassment of riches, music production wise. But it won't do me much good if I can't use the software properly, and Sonar X1 Producer has a LOT of bells and whistles to figure out. Fortunately there are some great tutorials on the web. One of the best sources of Sonar guidance is MCI Studio in the UK. MCI is pretty much dedicated to Sonar and offers an impressive range of tutorial videos and other resources. Finally I am learning how to use buses and vocal pitch correction correctly (among other cool stuff, like tips for recording background vocals). MCI stands for "musically creative inspiration." Indeed.

With all of these tools and knowledge, I'm hoping to record more at home on my next recording project, though I'm sure I will still need the impressive talents of my producer Roger Lavallee and the fabulous and nearby Tremolo Lounge for many tracks. I also need some new songs. I'm working on that in my not-so-copious spare time.

The Beatles Sex! I Mean LOVE!

2011-11-27T21:51:00.001-05:00

That post title is an experiment, prompted by a quick look at this blog's stats, courtesy of Google (who also hosts Blogspot blogs, of course). They keep track of everything, as you might expect of Google. Although I'm not blogging as much as I think I'd like to (and once did), I'm still curious about who might be reading my posts, which posts are most popular, how people got here, etc.

Thanks to Google, I know that the top 10 search keywords that brought readers to my blog are beatles love, the beatles love, beatles, music of the spheres, asteroid flyby, the beatles, airbus a380, flyingsinger blog, water cycle, and solar system. Water cycle? Anyway, it's striking that on my nominally space-themed blog, four of the top ten searches are for the Beatles! Hence my post title - if "beatles love" is big, how about "beatles sex?" My most popular post is one that I wrote about the Beatles LOVE show and CD on December 31, 2010. Number two is "Space Models," about my summer 2010 visit to the French space museum in Toulouse. I also know that to date, my blog has received 124,798 page views. (This is not exactly my "all time" page views, but only since Google started tracking my stats around June 2009 - I actually started this blog in October 2005.) I probably should have run some ads. But I know you hate that as much as I do.

Of course 124,798 is probably how many pageviews Lady Gaga gets per minute. But by mentioning Lady Gaga, the Beatles, and sex in this one post, I am positioning myself to give her a run for her money. Don't worry, though. I will not be mentioning Justin Bieber, Amy Adams, fixed mortgages, Ron Paul, or any other trendy terms just to try to drive traffic to my blog. Or sex.

Safe Travels (Don't Die): Go Curiosity!

2011-11-27T15:18:00.001-05:00

Lisa Hannigan's wonderful album "Passenger" includes a funny little song called "Safe Travels (Don't Die)." It sounds like it was inspired by a friend who says this to her when she travels, but here I am applying it to NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover which was launched yesterday. I caught the launch live on CNN, and it was a beautiful sight. So far the spacecraft seems to be in good health, and I do wish Curiosity safe travels on its long 251 day cruise to Mars.

I was fortunate enough to see Curiosity in the flesh (so to speak) during assembly in the clean room at the JPL Open House I attended in May 2009. The picture above shows the "sky crane" rocket platform that will gently lower the rover to the surface in August 2012. More pix on Flickr.

Why Do I Love This Book?

2011-11-10T20:05:00.001-05:00

There are a few books that I seem to be able to read many times and feel engaged and rewarded each time. One of these is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a novel by Mark Haddon. It's a curious book, a detective story of sorts, written from the point of view of Christopher, a 15 year old English boy who has a form of autism or perhaps asperger syndrome. He is extremely high-functioning in the areas of math, logic, science, and use of language. But his ability to understand and relate to people and emotions is quite limited. He generally prefers animals, because their reactions and emotions seem easier to understand than those of people, and they can't lie to you. Christopher is very logical about some things and seemingly very superstitious about others. Some of his behavior is rather bizarre and not very nice - yet for all this he's an extremely engaging and sympathetic character, and you get to see the world very clearly through his eyes. It's really a fascinating book that works on many levels, and I highly recommend it. I won't spoil it by revealing plot details - you can find plenty of reviews and summaries on Google or Amazon if you care to.

But why do I like it so much? I think it's because I relate more strongly to this character than I do to most fictional characters. I even feel a little bit like him in some ways (and not only because he wants to be an astronaut, even though he realizes that this is extremely unlikely for many reasons). I think it's something about the way he detaches himself from emotions and complicated human situations (or tries to). I see myself doing this sometimes. And also something about the way people don't understand him (but who hasn't felt that way sometimes?). I also like the way he makes and values certain observations that most people wouldn't make or value (a bit of the scientific or engineering mind there). I don't know. But I really like Christopher Boone and the chance to view of the world through his fictional but very real-seeming eyes.

Mozart for a Penny a Tune

2011-10-28T16:21:00.000-04:00

Amazon's MP3 daily deals can be pretty amazing. Today it is a new "99 Most Essential" classical collection, a "full works" Mozart edition for only 99 cents. The earlier X5 Mozart album was a "greatest hits" collection with 99 of his best-known individual movements. This can be nice at times, but I usually prefer to listen to classical music as the composer intended, which is typically three or more movements in sequence. X5 has been providing full versions for all of their recent composer collections, and now finally for Mozart as well.

These are 23 of Mozart's best known works (it appears to include complete versions of nearly all the works used in the soundtrack of the film "Amadeus"). If you enjoy Mozart as I do, you probably already have most of them on CD or MP3. But for 99 cents, I'm buying it just so I can have these works sitting on my Amazon Cloud Drive to listen to anywhere I have a web connection.

Carnival of Space #220

2011-10-24T09:20:00.000-04:00

I haven't been thinking or writing about space recently. Guess the moment isn't structured that way (to take the Tralfamadorian viewpoint). But other people are thinking and writing about space, and some of them are bloggers who have submitted posts for this week's Carnival of Space, hosted by we are all in the gutter (looking at the stars). Love that blog name.

There are many posts this week, on diverse space and astronomy related topics. There are also two contests, one of which is sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, a place I still remember fondly from my early childhood when we lived close to New York City and my parents would take me there to see dinosaur fossils and other wonders of the universe. A special exhibit, Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration, will run there from November 19 to August 12, 2012. The contest asks for 3 minute videos showing your personal out-of-this world vision for the future of space exploration. I think I could make a cool video using the Orbiter space flight simulator, but the deadline is November 3, and the moment is still not structured that way. I am still stuck in time the way Billy Pilgrim wasn't. Isn't. Won't be.

Too Much New Music!

2011-10-22T11:10:00.003-04:00

I seem to have a real need for the constant stimulation of new music, though this creates the problem of not having time to listen to all of it. I get most new music as MP3's, mostly from Amazon, and most often on sale (sometimes free), though I will pay full price for music I "must have now." Aside from Amazon's daily deals, I learn of new music through Paste Magazine (now called Paste mPlayer), from NPR (new music email list), on Pandora, through Facebook friends' recommendations, and sometimes even from the radio (usually 92.5 The River). Probably other ways too.

Just in the last week I bought a classical collection that was a $1.99 Daily Deal (The 99 Most Essential Autumn Classics), a new Michael Franks album that is wonderful (Time Together) and a cool Donald Fagen album I had never heard until a song from it came up on Pandora while I was doing dishes (Kamakiriad from 1993). Also a bunch of free Amazon samplers, including the very relaxing Native American Flute Lullabies.

So am I listening to all that great new music? No, actually I'm listening to a "must have now" album that I just bought, Katie Herzig's new one, The Waking Sleep. It sounds good so far! I'm actually shuffling that with some of the other recent ones as I write this blog post with two ulterior motives: to test out my new Feedburner feed and "follow by email" widget (found just to the right), and to delay starting on a bunch of "must do now" house work!

Great Songwriting Blog

2011-10-20T08:41:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago I was looking for music and songwriting apps for the iPod Touch, and I found one called "Secrets of Songwriting" by Gary Ewer. Essentially an e-book formatted as an app, it was pretty expensive for an app ($16.99), but not so bad for a music book, and as a "multimedia" app, it was able to include examples of chord progressions and melodies as sound samples. So I bought it. Although I found a few interesting ideas, it was really too basic for me, and the app format (no search, no bookmarks, etc.) was frustrating.

The good news was Gary Ewer's songwriting blog, which I discovered through this app. "The Essential Secrets of Songwriting" is frequently updated with tips and with songwriting analyses of hit songs ("Rolling in the Deep" by Adele is a great recent example). Some tips are quite specific and musical (chord inversions, visualizing melodies, modal chord progressions, "making a MIDI orchestra sound real"). Others are more motivation and workflow oriented (identifying goals, dealing with writer's block, starting vs. finishing songs, writing better lyrics). There is a lot of excellent and thought-provoking material on songwriting here, with a huge archive of past articles. I'm taking notes and trying some of these ideas as I am now working on some new songs for my next recording project.

So now I'm happy to have bought Gary's app, supporting a musician/writer who is providing valuable educational material to songwriters everywhere for free through his blog.

Europe on 140 Characters a Day

2011-10-18T21:56:00.001-04:00

I don’t have a Twitter account, and I tend to be long-winded when I talk or write, so I haven’t especially longed to tweet (I’d rather fly). But I’m also pretty busy these days, so I’m starting to see the value of that 140 character constraint. Sort of like haiku. So I’ll give it a shot here. MS Word can count my characters and keep me fairly honest. Throw in a few pix - mostly from mediocre BlackBerry camera (see explanation below).

Last week I was in Europe for a customer visit tour with our distributor. IT, FR, FR, UK, FR. Busy schedule but not the craziest ever.

A customer visit in Florence? Yes! Worth an extra day. As lovely as they say. Duomo, Boboli Gardens, and Galileo’s mummified fingers (oy).

Drive from Florence to Nice to Cannes for next customer. Tour of giant spacecraft assembly clean rooms. Sunny drive back to Nice Airport.

Toulouse (too tight?). Nice rosy city. Good weather, good customers, good food. Great food, actually. But no wifi (recurring hotel problem).

Fly Manchester England England, drive to Wales. Shortest UK trip ever (12 hours). Long enough to lose digital camera in rental car. :(

Paris! Business first, including a visit to the Observatoire de Meudon, with great views of Paris. Small hotel in the 6th. Duck dinner.

Late flight Saturday, time to relax and hang out in Jardin du Luxembourg on a gorgeous fall day. Wish I had my real camera. Lunch, fly home.

My new travel companion: an actual Kindle (not app on iPod). New model, small, light, ultra-white display, easy to read. Great buy ($79).

Flying History

2011-10-07T19:47:00.000-04:00

Wow, busy fall. Not much time for blogging. I didn't even blog about one of the coolest things I've done in a long time. On September 26, I took a flight in a B-24 Liberator! After seeing the Collings Foundation's B-17 fly over my house, I called their flight coordinator and booked a B-24 flight the next morning at Worcester Airport. It was amazing. After takeoff, my fellow bomber enthusiasts and I were able to wander the whole aircraft, from the tail gunner position, to the waist guns, along the narrow catwalk through the bomb bay, up to the flight deck, and to even crawl through the tunnel to the bombardier's nose position.

We stayed low and the whole flight only lasted about 30 minutes, but it was enough to give me a feel for what it was like to fly such a beast. It's built to carry bombs and fuel with not much in the way of comforts for the crew. I have even more respect now for the WW2 aviators who flew these big noisy things on long missions, often with people trying to shoot them down.

More B-24 pictures on Flickr.

B-17 at Six O'Clock Low!

2011-09-25T20:24:00.001-04:00

I learned this weekend that the Collings Foundation is in town this week, flying their B-17, B-24, and TF-51 war birds out of nearby Worcester airport (KORH). I learned this when a B-17 flew over my back yard Saturday at around 5 pm, then again at about 6 o'clock. That's when it hit me that it had to be sightseeing rides out of Worcester. I checked the schedule and found that there was a 5:30 pm flight today, so I was ready with a camera. Around 5:45 he showed up, higher and well south of me. A little later he was closer and made a few cool turns (still high though, maybe 2000 feet). Then I assumed he was gone, but at 6:15 I heard the rumbling again and ran to the back yard just in time to catch him flying directly overhead! I took a video this time. He was heading back to ORH (I could see him lowering the landing gear when I reviewed the video).

While checking the schedule I took the opportunity to schedule a flight myself in the B-24, with which I have a family connection. That will be 8:30 Monday morning. I'm psyched!

Hearing and Writing Drums

2011-09-25T13:43:00.001-04:00

One thing I've always had a problem with in my own recording efforts is drums. I've used all sorts of pre-recorded drum loops in my songs and demos (including a set recorded by Mick Fleetwood), and I've tried to learn the various drum programming tools or plug-ins that are available for use with SONAR, but I never quite "got it." I admired (and envied) my producer Roger's ability to hear me play a new song on acoustic guitar and immediately start to lay out a drum track that works for it in Protools. It's talent and experience, I know. I want some!

I still don't have that ability, but I made a breakthrough this weekend with an old (1991!) book and a new iPod Touch app. The book is Drum Programming (A Complete Guide to Program and Think Like a Drummer) by Ray E. Badness (love that name!). It's a thin book with basic discussion of the features and limitations of drum kits and drummers (including the unfortunate fact of only two arms and two feet). Plus a ton of examples in a very simple tabular notation.

The app is Easy Beats 2, and it's just great. I had played with the free version and wasn't too impressed, but the ability to save and load patterns and drum kits in the full, updated version ($4.99) makes a huge difference. I was quickly able to enter the examples from the Badness book and hear the effects of different kick drum, high-hat, and ride cymbal patterns. It's easy to experiment with changes and new patterns, and you can easily sequence up to 16 patterns into a full song. There are a number of different drum kits, from basic synthesized kits to real recorded kits and more.

Best of all, this simple deconstruction of drum track basics, combined with a DIY "workshop" on drum patterns, now has me listening with fresh ears to the drum parts on all sorts of songs, even songs I've heard a million times or even wrote myself (with drums programmed by Roger). I still haven't done a fully original drum track for a song of mine, but I think I'm getting close. I have ordered a new, powerful laptop PC and the latest version of Cakewalk's recording software (Sonar X1). This will replace my now-dead 2002-vintage desktop PC which would barely run SONAR 3. With this and the many new music tools on the iPod Touch, I'm ready to start a new musical chapter of some sort.

Meanwhile I have a few new musical experiments on SoundCloud.

A Song Is Born (on my iPod)

2011-09-17T08:46:00.001-04:00

I've been trying to learn a bunch of music apps on the iPod Touch, as I have written about recently. The best way to learn them is to create some music, so I have, and I've posted some of these musical experiments on SoundCloud (which is free for some amount of music hosting - pretty cool). Most of them are one to two minute improvised instrumental fragments, but this weekend I wrote and demoed a new song, "Open Up Your Eyes," and that's up there too. The lyrics are incomplete and the demo is pretty rough, but not bad considering that the iPod is providing all the instruments as well as the "studio" for this little project. I think it's cool, but now it's time to do something else with what's left of the weekend.

The Science of Tyrannosaurus rex

2011-09-17T07:38:00.000-04:00

The Science of Tyrannosaurus rex: Using digital paleontology to reconstruct one of history's largest carnivores.

These animations and explanations are really amazing and the first one about how T. Rex walked is funny too. The music doesn't really apply now, but T and his friends did manage to stay alive for quite a few million years.

Songwriting Tools for iOS

2011-09-11T23:09:00.000-04:00

I've been playing around with a bunch of songwriting and recording apps on my iPod Touch. I feel like a new songwriting and recording phase is brewing, and until I get a new recording PC to replace my broken old desktop, all I really have to work with is my iPod. Fortunately iOS apps for music have really improved, and many of them now support audio copy/paste or WAV file import/export, so it is possible to chain together the results from several apps.

My "work flow" for songwriting depends on where I am and what tools are available. At home I have a few guitars, a MIDI keyboard, and until recently, a PC with various recording software and hardware. I write songs in various ways - sometimes lyrics first, sometimes melody or rhythm first. But my usual methods are

Guitar/voice - Play around with chord progressions on a guitar (sometimes keyboard) while singing melody ideas (with lyrics or "la la" placeholders or some combination). Record fragments for later review, record a simple demo when more or less complete, usually guitar/voice on SONAR.
BIAB - Play around with chord progressions, styles, keys, tempo in the PC program Band in a Box, tweaking and singing to that track. Import MIDI from BIAB to record demo in SONAR. I documented an example of a song written and recorded with BIAB in early 2009.
Rhythm based - Like (1), except using a drum machine or drum loops in SONAR to drive the song away from habitual strumming or finger picking patterns.

SONAR is a big plus in all of this - it easily integrates audio and MIDI recording with any number of tracks, including various looping and synthesized sound possibilities.

Now with the iPod Touch (third generation, which is important since many of the music apps won't work well on earlier generation Touches and iPhones), I have most of these methods available, including some guitar and keyboard substitutes for when the real things aren't available (clunky but helpful). There is nothing yet as powerful as SONAR or Band in a Box, but audio copy/paste allow combining multiple apps to accomplish similar things. The small screen can be a problem (helped by clever UI design), and input options are limited mainly to an external microphone. I bought some simple interface hardware to allow line-level inputs (keyboard, electric guitar, microphone pre-amp) which helps when I'm home. Here are the apps I'm using now (I won't bother with links - search in YouTube for demos or in the iTunes app store to buy):

ChordBot - Similar to BIAB in that it is based on progressions defined by chord names with your choice of key, tempo, and playing style, but with many fewer styles. It has both WAV and MIDI file export.

Multitrack DAW - I recently wrote about this app. I've upgraded to 24 tracks (total cost about $25). It's no SONAR (no MIDI or looping support and very limited audio effects), but it does the job for basic multitrack audio recording.

Guitar and iShred - These guitar simulation apps (acoustic and electric) use programmable chord buttons with strummable/pickable virtual strings (picture above). Good sounds, good UI, decent copy/paste. Expressive strumming or picking is pretty hard but possible with practice. I also have the PianoStudio app from the same company. Same idea, but you can program complex patterns (or chords) onto buttons with the phrase editor (similar to the piano roll interface in many MIDI-based applications). I'm just figuring out how to use this app. Could be useful for adding piano parts to some recordings since it supports audio copy/paste. It replaces the burden of accurate performance on a tiny screen with the burden of breaking the piece down into parts and assigning them to buttons which you then press in sequence to perform the piece.

ThumbJam - Brilliant UI and great sampled sounds as I have written about before. Recording & looping work well but with very limited editing capability.The wide range of scales could lead to some innovative melodies and song ideas once I stop fiddling with it. Pretty good copy/paste support. There are some odd tempo and looping issues that I'm still trying to overcome, but it really is the most "musical" app I've yet seen for iOS. It uses the touch screen and the accelerometer (tilt and shake) to support truly fluid instrumental performance (just add talent!).

SSW - Simple Songwriter uses button-driven piano block chords that you can play and record. Limited time options (3/4 or 4/4 with controllable tempo), clunky sound on playback (overly time quantized?), and no copy/paste or export, though it might have a song or two in it, at least for a chord progression idea I can write down and use in another app like Chordbot. Key word is "simple."

Loopy - I just got this "beat box" app, and it has an impressively easy interface. Not sure yet if this is really a useful tool for my 70's style songwriting, but it sure is cool.

BeatStudio and DrumTracks - Two of many drum machine type apps that I'm still trying to figure out. Some copy/paste and other transfer options for moving rhythm tracks into Multitrack DAW or ThumbJam. I'm not a very good drummer, but I can come up with some decent sounding things for demo purposes.

I'm still mostly experimenting with UI, copy/paste, and available sounds and rhythms using short examples. I have some promising fragments. I haven't really written a full song or recorded a full demo yet, but I'm getting close. Songwriting isn't all or even mostly about technology - I've written songs with nothing but my voice and paper on a plane (singing the result into my voice mail at the airport after landing - this was before I carried a voice recorder or equivalent device like a smart phone or iPod Touch). I've also written dozens of songs with just a guitar and my voice. But new technologies can inspire new ideas and approaches, and I think these iPod tools will yield some cool results before too long.

Apollo 17 from LRO!

2011-09-08T21:30:00.001-04:00

I just love today's APOD, a low altitude photo of the Apollo 17 site taken recently by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). With its orbit adjusted to make a low pass of about 22 km above the surface (about 14 miles or 73,000 feet), it was able to capture a very detailed view of the LM descent stage and other hardware left behind at the site, as well as the tire tracks from the Lunar Rover (LRV). The picture below shows the A17 descent stage just after the ascent stage launched on December 14, 1972 (video frame from the TV camera on the LRV, parked about 150 meters away as shown in the LRO photo above).

This should finally put to rest all the nonsense about how the moon landings were faked, but of course conspiracy theorists will take it in stride - after all LRO is a NASA spacecraft that is (allegedly) orbiting the moon, and how easy would it be to fake this picture with PhotoShop? Child's play! They've kept the secrets of the moon landings covered up for nearly 40 years, why stop now?

JPL Wants YOU!

2011-09-07T21:28:00.000-04:00

September is the only month in which you can apply to become a JPL Solar System Ambassador. This is a great volunteer program for educational and community outreach on space exploration and astronomy themes. If you have an interest in space exploration, enjoy sharing your enthusiasm with others, and would like to learn more about space exploration yourself, this program might be just the thing for you! Although I haven't been as active recently as I was a few years ago, I've really enjoyed the outreach events I have done and the training I've received as a Solar System Ambassador. And you have to admit it's a cool title.

You can find more information and a link to the application here. The program only operates in the United States.

Where's the Space?

2011-09-03T14:47:00.001-04:00

In case anyone is wondering about the lack of space-related blogging in recent months, I will briefly explain the concept of "serial obsession." Throughout my life I have had a few major non-career interest areas, and apart from the ever-present themes of books and music listening, I tend to pursue one or two of these interests obsessively for some period of time, ranging from weeks to years, then move on (or back) to something else. The major categories are music creation/performance, languages, flying, and space. The latter two are somewhat linked, at least historically (my interests in space and in flying emerged around the same time, around 1962 when I was 9 years old).

From 2005 to 2008, space pretty much held sway, starting from my discovery of the free Orbiter space flight simulator in early 2005. That led to blogging about Orbiter, writing Go Play In Space, becoming a JPL Solar System Ambassador, educational outreach, and getting involved with an astronomy club (mainly for outreach related to space). Music was the theme for 2009-2010, culminating with the "release" of my second CD (Message from Tomorrow) in June 2010. The rest of 2010 and early 2011 were mostly eaten by my job (company was acquired in October 2010). This summer I have gotten back into flying, as reported in excruciating detail on my flying blog.

So where is space? It is lying fallow at the moment, waiting for its turn to come again on the Great Circle of Obsessions. I'm sure it will come. The budgie's not dead, it's just resting. Just like the US space program (I hope!).

But I do continue to at least peek at the space blogs and at the emails I get from NASA, and yesterday something really cool arrived. JPL announced Eyes on the Solar System, an interactive, 3D, real-data-driven, web-based "browser" for all the contents of the Solar System. It's different from Orbiter in that it is web based and (JPL) data-driven, rather than spacecraft oriented. There are indeed many spacecraft in "Eyes on the Solar System," and you can tag along with any of them, as shown in the picture above (Galileo fly-by of Io in 1995). But you can't launch your own spacecraft - or put another way, you don't HAVE to launch your own spacecraft to explore any place, object, or time in the solar system. It's VERY cool and I plan to explore it and write more about it as soon as I can. Maybe that will be the trigger for the next big space phase. Who knows? As this blog's tag line says, "Space flight, simulators, astronomy, books, flying, music, science, education: whatever the obsession of the moment might happen to be."

Multitrack DAW on iPod Touch

2011-08-28T12:30:00.002-04:00

I've been trying out some of the more recent music creation apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch. I wrote about ThumbJam the other day, and I've just bought and tried out another amazing little app, Multitrack DAW. "DAW" means "digital audio workstation," and this app is a pretty credible rendition for a pocket-size device (and for just $10 with 8 available tracks). It can be upgraded to 16 ($8) or 24 ($15) tracks through an in-app purchase.

Yesterday we prepared our house for the approaching Hurricane Irene, and today we are "hunkered down" and waiting for its powerful wind and rains to pass by. So far so good as far as damage and flooding (none) and electricity (haven't lost it). So in honor of the hurricane (now "only" a tropical storm), and to test out this new recording app on something simple, I recorded a short version of the classic "Goodnight, Irene" with acoustic guitar, multiple vocals, and finger snaps. It works quite well, and the user interface makes excellent use of the small screen space and touch-screen controls. In the screen shot above, you can see the big pan control that pops up when you select the small one on the track.

Multitrack DAW is missing a few things that full-size recording programs like SONAR have, most notably any sort of reverb or delay (it does have compression and EQ). This is not a horrible limitation if you use this app for its most obvious purpose, which is as an always handy "scratch pad" for song and recording ideas. It has very complete file transfer features via a WiFi network, allowing for import/export of individual tracks as well as complete mixes. Once I get a new PC to run SONAR (my old home desktop PC died recently), I will be able to transfer works in progress easily enough.

In the meantime, I will experiment with ways to integrate the various music apps to help me write some new songs. Many of them now support some sort of copy/paste between music apps, though currently there are a couple of competing standards so you can't directly transfer between all music apps. Another limitation is inputs. On the iPod Touch, you can plug in a combination microphone/headphone device for direct audio input. I have also ordered an adapter that allows line-level inputs (with headphone monitoring) so I can directly record other devices (keyboards, guitar processors, quality microphone pre-amps, etc.). This adapter costs more than the app itself (about $30)!

When you think about the old 4-track cassette systems that cost hundreds of dollars and had far less capability, this app is amazing, even if you spring for the extra $15 for 24 tracks for a total of $25. Crazy.

Update: I learned that ThumbJam supports both common iOS music copy/paste formats when it copies, so I can actually copy a track from TJ and paste it into Multitrack DAW. Excellent!

ThumbJam: Where the Songs Are

2011-08-24T08:59:00.001-04:00

Songwriting comes and goes for me. A project like my 2010 "Message from Tomorrow" CD will typically inspire a bunch of songs, although not as many as I would like. Actually there are usually many songs started, just not very many finished. But fortunately for my first two CD's, I had a small backlog of older songs that I still liked well enough to want to rediscover and record. Now those old chestnuts have mostly been mined, leading me to wonder where the inspiration will come from for my next recording project.

Now I know. I discovered ThumbJam for the iPod Touch (and iPhone), the first music app I've found that I believe can really help me with songwriting and recordings. Basically it's a bunch of nicely sampled instruments with a simple loop recording system and a brilliant interface for playing the instruments. Rather than trying to make a guitar fretboard or conventional black and white keyboard fit the iPod/iPhone touchscreen, Thumbjam presents a simple full-screen panel of notes in a chosen scale and key (you can play up to 6 notes at a time if your fingers will fit). Simple controls line the edge of the playing area, and the accelerometer is used to provide intuitive control of volume, pitch bending, vibrato, and tremolo. It's crazy good. Check out some of the videos here.

My big obsessions in life are music and flying, and right now I'm in a long-delayed flying phase, but over the next few months, increased business travel and fall/winter weather will reduce the flying as it always does. But I'm already thinking about getting a new PC for recording and flight sims (my 2002 desktop recording PC has finally died). I have recording software, drum machines, guitars, a MIDI keyboard, sample libraries, music apps, etc., and I have used all of these things to inspire and help me write songs. But none of those things brings the control of instrument sounds, scales, keys, and rhythms into an accessible, intimate, intuitive, powerful, and always handy form as Thumbjam does. I've already recorded three new song ideas in the first 3 hours of playing with it. I think it's the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Great Band: The Grip Weeds

2011-08-19T13:46:00.001-04:00

With the help of Pandora, I recently discovered a band I really love, The Grip Weeds . Although they have been around since the early 90’s, I had never heard of them until a song of theirs showed up on Pandora (on a station based on Winterpills, a favorite indie band from Massachusetts). They are sometimes labeled as power pop or psychedelic rock, and there is definitely something from the sixties in their sound. While they are not emulating any particular band, I can hear hints of the Who, Buffalo Springfield, Spirit, CSNY, The Beatles and others. Their harmonies and guitar parts are great. Great drumming too. While I love the rocking electric guitar driven songs, some of my favorites are acoustic tunes like "Give Me Some of Your Ways" and "Life and Love, Times To Come" (cool Indian instruments on this one).

I bought their 2008 collection “Infinite Soul: The Best Of The Grip Weeds” and their 2010 double album “Strange Change Machine.” Both are wonderful. You can currently get a free 8-song sampler from SCM by signing up with an email address at their web site. You can buy the 24 song double album as a download there as well for $9.99 which is considerably cheaper than the price at Amazon or iTunes (about $16). The band probably makes more money that way too. They are definitely worth supporting.

Beech Tree Book Serendipity

2011-08-14T14:41:00.003-04:00

I've always loved bookstores, new and used. For me, serendipity is the major draw of the small independent store. Amazon can offer me anything I want if I know I want it. But what about all the promising books that I probably would want if I only knew about them? This is the role of the physical bookstore, which unfortunately is fast becoming an endangered species (thanks in no little part to Amazon and other internet booksellers).

So I was happy this weekend to discover a brand-new used book and record store literally down the street from my house. Beech Tree Books and Records is located at 9 Maple Street in West Boylston, Massachusetts, less than a mile from me and just a few minutes drive from Worcester. They opened on July 30 and readily admit to being a "work in progress" as they continue to add stock to lightly filled shelves and record and CD bins. But I managed to find two "must have" books on my very first visit, including Rockets, Jets, Guided Missiles, and Space Ships by Jack Coggins and Fletcher Pratt, a 1951 (!) illustrated book for kids, with an introduction by Willy Ley! It's heavy on the V-2 (which was practically the latest in rocket technology at the time) but bravely delves into orbits, space stations, moon landings, and even the exploration of Mars and Titan. What a great find for a space geek like myself. One of my favorite paragraphs from this 60 year old book is from Ley's introduction (with quoted words as written):

What are the next twenty years going to bring? One of the great things to come is under discussion among scientists right now. It is the "orbital rocket," a small rocket which will circle earth outside our atmosphere for "ever." This means, of course, "for a very long time," months, years, decades, possibly centuries. Such an orbital rocket would not carry any people but only instruments, instruments of the type which can be "read" from a distance because they are coupled with an automatic radio transmitter and continuously broadcast their findings.

Beech Tree Books and Records is already a great little store with a lot of cool books, records, and CD's already on display at very reasonable prices and with more on the way. If you're in or near central Mass. and you like books, you should definitely check out this store.

Science!

2011-08-12T11:32:00.001-04:00

I love this. My son-in-law is a post-doc and he says it's pretty much right. Graphic by Matúš Soták.

SFO to CDG in 2 Minutes!

2011-07-25T20:42:00.000-04:00

SF to Paris in Two Minutes from Beep Show on Vimeo.

I found this video on the Airpigz blog. It's really cool. This guy took a still picture out the window of an Air France 747 every two miles from San Francisco to Paris (the camera was on a special mount).

Ghost Ants? Yes!

2011-07-24T15:41:00.000-04:00

When a friend told me about Prophets of the Ghost Ants by Clark Carlton, I made the mistake of "taking a quick look." Since I'm just getting back into flying this summer after a few years away, I've really been trying to focus on study for my flight review, but I kept getting sucked back into this book instead! I really couldn't put it down (and since I was reading it in the Kindle edition on my iPod Touch, it was always at hand).

I'm not usually a fantasy reader (I tend to go for "hard SF"), but this book is somehow in a strange zone that is not quite fantasy, not quite "hard" science fiction, but is "sciencey" enough to reward my suspension of disbelief (great storytelling and characters helped too). The last time this happened was with a book Amazon was giving away as a Kindle loss-leader, His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik. I was skeptical because dragon books are generally pure fantasy, but it was no risk to try. In that book, Novik re-imagines the Napoleonic wars with air power - flying, intelligent, talking dragons that crews of men ride into battle. The historical fiction is played straight (like a naval history novel), and the dragons are simply folded into that world (with great relationships between the dragons and their crews, especially their captains). That worked well enough to sell me six sequels! I think Carlton's "ant world" will be equally fertile (despite a similar disregard for physical scaling laws - dragons as described would be way too heavy to fly, and ant-size humans? I don't know, but it works in the book!).

Some Amazon reviewers have mentioned The Lord of the Rings, and I have to agree that the scope, world-building, compelling characters, and action/battle scenes of this book are of that quality. There is also the "unlikely hero" angle - but otherwise the stories are completely different. And although it's not hard SF, the biology of ants and other insects is an important part of the way these tiny human societies work, and it seems to be pretty accurate (and occasionally disgusting). There's also a tremendous amount of cultural anthropology embedded in this book - not in a scholarly way, but in an Ursula Le Guin sort of way. Under these circumstances and constraints, what would societies be like? What would their folk ways be like? Carlton has clearly thought a lot about these things, and they give the book an amazing depth and richness.

This is a great book. I can't wait for the sequels (and the movie!). Highly recommended!

Cool Vacation

2011-07-23T23:07:00.000-04:00

I'm just back from a really great vacation with my wife in Las Vegas and San Francisco. We did some really cool things and got to spend a lot of time with family in Berkeley. We took a huge number of pictures that I hope we will look at someday. I'll paste a few in here. Here are a few highlights:

An early morning helicopter sightseeing tour from Las Vegas to the western end of the Grand Canyon, descending into the canyon and landing next to the Colorado River where the Papillon Helicopter Company provided champagne and a snack to supplement the amazing views. I've posted a number of photos and videos of this tour on my Flickr site.

The wonderful Cirque du Soleil show "Beatles - LOVE" at the Mirage.

An open-top bus tour of San Francisco. It was my wife's first time there so this was a great way to get an overview of the city despite the fog that blocked most of our view of the Golden Gate Bridge even as we were crossing it (the rest of the city was clear).

A visit to Muir Woods National Monument to see some of the beautiful and ancient redwoods there.

A hike in Tilden Regional Park in the Berkeley Hills - great views of the Bay Area. Followed by a fabulous dinner at the Chez Panisse Cafe in Berkeley.

A walk up SF's Telegraph Hill followed by a fabulous seafood lunch in North Beach and a de rigueur cable car ride.

We also took some time to relax, hang out, and to even enjoy a sunset over the Bay from a park adjacent to the Berkeley Marina.

End of the First Space Plane Era

2011-07-21T22:29:00.003-04:00

With the final landing of Atlantis (STS-135) early this morning, our first space plane era has ended after 30 years. I'm sure that human spaceflight will continue, and we will have other, better space planes someday. But Atlantis and her sister shuttles were a pretty audacious start, designed and built as they were with the technology of the 60's and early 70's. I'm happy that I got to witness the one launch that I did (Endeavour's STS-118 back in 2007). I would have loved to have flown in one.

I couldn't do that, but I was happy to discover last night that version 2.0 of the great iPhone app F-SIM Space Shuttle was recently released. The new version of this shuttle landing simulator adds wonderful external views and a cool replay feature that allows you to enjoy your successful landings and scrutinize your errors in great detail. The shuttle era lives on in a small way on my iPod Touch and on iPhones and iPads everywhere.

Here's a great personal video of the real STS-135 landing from someone who had a great viewing spot, and here's the official NASA video which includes a few seconds of the cockpit HUD view at the very start (F-SIM Space Shuttle duplicates the HUD view and behavior quite exactly).

Photographic Moon Book (v3.5)

2011-07-09T08:52:00.000-04:00

This is something I just rediscovered on my hard drive while looking for something else. I wrote about Alan Chu's wonderful Photographic Moon Book in 2007. It is an observer's photographic guidebook to the Moon containing nearly 300 annotated images of lunar features as well as some great introductory material on the Moon. Alan has continued to update and improve it. He released version 3.5 in March 2011. It's a free PDF, and it's big - 125 MB. You can download it from Alan's own Hong Kong site, or from a US based mirror site.

When I first found this in 2007, there was also a smaller document called the "Moon Science Primer." Most of this material is in the introductory section of the Moon Book, but the Primer goes a little deeper on some topics. Although Google still has a link to this, there is no link on Alan's home page, and the Google link returns a "not found."

Flying Posts: See "Flight School Retrojournal"

2011-07-04T15:43:00.002-04:00

As I discussed recently, I've started to get back into flying, and it's really fun. I'm flying a Citabria 7ECA "Aurora" at Sterling Airport with the airplane's owner, Ed Urbanowski of Urban Aviation. It's a great little airplane, and Ed is a great instructor. Since I've been away from flying for seven years (yikes!), it will probably take a few hours with an instructor to get my skills back into shape. But I'm in no hurry. Safety first and all that.

So far it's going well - but it's only been two flights, and there's a lot to re-learn. Since I already have another blog devoted to (retroactively) documenting my original flight lessons (1997 to 2001, more or less), I've decided to use that blog for my current lessons as well. Even though it's called Flight School Retrojournal, I'll blog all the new stuff too - re-learning old tricks, breaking old habits, getting current, getting signed off to fly tail-wheel airplanes,and all that. So if you are interested in the nitty-gritty of learning (or re-learning) to fly, check out my other blog. There probably won't be a lot of photos, since I've decided to spend every minute in the cockpit focused on flying. I'll save the sightseeing for when I can fly on my own again - maybe this fall.

Putting the "Flying" Back in FlyingSinger

2011-06-26T21:41:00.004-04:00

Recently I've been thinking about what a shame it is that I have my private pilot's license but haven't piloted an airplane in over five years. Of course flying is pretty expensive and requires a lot of time, study, and attention to do it safely, and I've been pretty busy with other things. But I miss it.

Today I was in Marlboro, MA for brunch with my daughters when I happened to drive by Marlboro Airport (9B1). I had never visited 9B1 before, so I stopped to check it out. A student pilot (I assumed) in a Cessna 172 was practicing takeoffs and landings, so I watched for a while. I noticed that the single runway is quite short, with tall trees quite close to the approach end that was in use at the time (runway 32, landing to the northwest). The nearby trees reminded me of Hopedale Airport (1B6) where I took my first few flight lessons back in 1997, although when I went into the FBO to ask about rental and instruction rates, I learned that Marlboro's runway is much shorter than Hopedale's (by about half, 1659 feet vs. 3172 feet!).

Marlboro Airport is about half an hour from home, and since I now work in Marlboro, I started thinking about what it would take to get current in a C152 or C172. Probably a few hours of refresher lessons to prepare for a flight review (BFR) before I can rent an airplane and fly solo again (plus I will need to get a current medical certificate). The short, narrow runway would certainly encourage disciplined flying and provide an additional challenge.

Driving home I realized I should also check out the airport that's closest to my house, Sterling (3B3). I've flown there a few times, including a couple of soaring lessons, and it's a nice little airport with a 3086' asphalt runway and a parallel grass runway that's used by the gliders and tail draggers. So I took the twelve minute drive and got a pleasant surprise - the flight school there is now run by Ed Urbanowski, a flight instructor from whom I had taken a few tail wheel lessons back in 2004 over in Spencer (60M). Ed now instructs full-time and has a Citabria 7ECA Aurora (pictured) in addition to the Piper Cub we flew in 2004 and two Cessna aircraft. I didn't finish the tail-wheel endorsement, and I would still like to do that. Unlike the bare-bones classic Cub, the Citabria has a modern panel and an electrical system (no need to pull the prop!), and it can be soloed from the front seat. It's got a stick rather than a yoke (like the Cub), and it looks like a fun airplane to fly. So I signed up for my first refresher lesson for next Saturday morning. To be continued (finally!)...

I took this "artistic" picture of Sterling Airport on a late afternoon glider flight looking west on the downwind leg.

The Soul of a Not-Quite-Thinking Machine

2011-06-23T21:59:00.002-04:00

I just finished a wonderful book, Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything by Stephen Baker. Baker had inside access to the IBM team that developed Watson, the amazing question-answering computer system that bested two human champions on Jeopardy early this year. The book quickly jumped the queue in my Amazon Kindle app after I read the sample chapter. I've always been fascinated by artificial intelligence, and I had already read a bit about Watson in a New York Times series last fall and through a number of web sources, but I somehow missed this book. It came out in February, shortly after the Watson shows had aired.

While Baker discusses some of the technology behind Watson, it's really the story of a group of talented humans who took on a great challenge. IBM had already been working on natural language-based question answering systems, but when the "Blue J" project started in 2006, they were nowhere near the level of any human player, let alone champions like Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. The book reminded me most of Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine which I read sometime in the 1980's.

As interested as I was in Watson, I missed the original Jeopardy broadcast due to travel, and I had seen only a few brief excerpts. While reading the book, I decided I should really watch the whole three-show tournament, which I was able to do (without commercials) in about an hour thanks to YouTube. I was also curious to know more about the technology of Watson than I had learned from Baker and the other general things I had read online. I found a great paper from AI Magazine's fall 2010 issue, "An Overview of the DeepQA Project" (PDF), written by the IBM Watson project leader David Ferrucci and 11 members of his team. It is really incredible to learn about what goes on behind the scenes to allow Watson to answer virtually any Jeopardy question in 3-5 seconds with such incredible precision and confidence. "Confidence" is a big part of why this "QA" technology is different from something like Google's search technology which usually gets you into the neighborhood of an answer, but depends on having a human in the loop to determine the "right" answer. Watson has no human in the loop, so it needs to "know what it knows" to decide whether to "buzz in" on a Jeopardy question. It puts its "hypotheses" through extensive evaluation to determine its confidence in each one as a possible answer.

Of course IBM does not claim that Watson is "intelligent" or that it "thinks" anything like we do, but you could say that human brains are also massively parallel computing systems with thousands of inter-communicating subsystems. Watson's subsystems are in server racks. Our subsystems are squishy. Diversity! So let's give a warm welcome to our new computer overlord cousin, shall we?

Increasing Cloudiness

2011-06-18T19:00:00.003-04:00

A few months ago I started using Amazon's Cloud Drive service to store some of my music online. This was pretty much a no-brainer since I often buy MP3's from Amazon anyway, and these are now stored for you by default (and for free) on their cloud. You can also download them if you so choose. I don't have a huge amount of music there, about 2000 songs, mostly recent Amazon purchases. It includes about 5 GB of selected music I have uploaded, but I didn't really want to "commit" to Amazon's cloud service too quickly (other than the free part) since I assumed other things would be coming along, which of course is true. I do listen to the Amazon Cloud Player quite often since it includes a lot of my recent music, some of which I haven't bothered to download, especially a few 99-track classical collections bought on sale for $1.99 or so. The player has limited features but works quite well.

A few days ago I received an invitation to join Google Music Beta (I had requested this in May when it was announced). This is a pretty good deal, since Google will store up to 20,000 songs for free (at least for now - I haven't really read the fine print, but Google doesn't seem to worry much about storage as long as they have your eyeballs). The catch is that you have to upload all the songs you want them to store for you. To help you with this task, they can look at your iTunes or Windows Media Player music files to figure out what to upload (pretty much automatically, including iTunes playlists).

So it's an easy thing to do, but if you have a lot of music as I do, it's a long process. I've had it running on a good internet connection for two full overnights as well as all day today, and so far it's got about 5,800 of my estimated 20,000 songs online. I haven't paid too much attention to it except to correct occasional album cover art errors (I have a lot of MP3's ripped from CD's, most of which have cover art in iTunes, but Google sometimes gets its own and sometimes chooses wrong). The player is good though also quite basic, but this is "beta" so I assume this web-based interface will improve over time. You can start listening to music as soon as you have a few files there, which is cool. I think of it as a playable off-site backup for my music collection (though there is no provision I can see to re-download your music, so in that sense it's not a real backup).

Come fall I expect to have a third cloud full of music, once Apple introduces its full iCloud service. That will be really cool because it will scan my iTunes collection and re-create it online without my having to upload most of it (I will only have to upload anything I have that isn't in iTunes' 19 million song collection - things like vinyl albums that never made it to CD that I have ripped to MP3). I think iCloud will be the real deal because it will work directly with my iPod Touch as well as our PC's and my wife's iPhone.

Shuttle Nostalgia

2011-06-11T21:32:00.001-04:00

Today I was looking at some of the great ISS-Endeavour photos taken on May 23 by the ISS Expedition 27 crew from their departing Soyuz spacecraft (there's a wonderful NASA gallery here, cool video here). What a beautiful sight! This got me thinking about the fact that there's only one shuttle flight left, coming up in less than a month if things stay on schedule. Of course this is not shocking news for space enthusiasts, but it is still sad to think there will be no more flights of this amazing spacecraft.

This nostalgia carried me to Amazon where I started to look at shuttle books and videos before realizing, hey, I've already got some great shuttle books and videos that I haven't looked at in ages. Not that this will keep me from buying more (especially this 30 year retrospective coming out in late August), but I ended up re-reading most of the astronaut anecdotes from Space Shuttle: The First 20 Years -- The Astronauts' Experiences in Their Own Words which was published in 2002 (looks like it's out of print now - available only from third-party sellers). This is a fantastic book with a great selection of photographs and reference material on all the shuttle flights through STS-102 in March 2001.

But what makes it special are the astronauts' own words about their experiences, from the mundane to the sublime. Some comments are technical, like John Young discussing the very first reentry on STS-1, "It was a pretty good test flight, and we discovered a lot of things. For example, coming into the atmosphere at Mach 25 we got a really bad sideslip that we didn't expect, where the orbiter slipped sideways four degrees and dropped in altitude. Fortunately the software canceled it out. If it hadn't, we wouldn't be here." Some are humorous stories, like the crew of STS-95 (1998) teasing Senator John Glenn (77 at the time) about being a shuttle "rookie" and staging a little gag involving a fake "Shuttle boarding pass" that Glenn didn't have. There are a number of stories about illusions and other effects coming about from zero-G (like dropping some object just after returning from orbit, subconsciously expecting it to float). Many astronauts comment about the amazing views of Earth and on how the view of the "whole Earth" changed their lives. It's a wide range of subjects - about a third of the more than 250 people who flew on the shuttle from 1981 to 2001 responded, and they were told to talk about whatever experiences they chose.

It's hard to pick a favorite, but there's a cool one that shows how it's all relative. Joe Edwards was the pilot on STS-89, and he talks about thinking that he was born too late for Apollo and too early to make it to Mars. At a memorial service for Alan Shepherd in 1998, he was talking with some other "younger generation" shuttle astronauts about this "born too late" idea when veteran Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell walked over. Jim wanted to say hello and to tell them about his discussion with "Neil, Buzz, and Gene" in which they decided they were born too early. Huh? Lovell said, "Well, you guys get the opportunity to go up to the space station. You get to fly the only reusable spacecraft that's ever been built, and you get to do all of these difficult and challenging things. We were just born too early. All we ever got to do was Apollo."

Well, Jim, that was still something. Apollo is history and in another month or so, the shuttle program will be history too. But I'm sure there will still be some difficult and challenging things for the next few generations of astronauts to do.

Carnival of Space 200!

2011-06-05T16:30:00.001-04:00

The Carnival of Space is 200 this week! Of course that is only 200 weeks, but it's still a pretty nice number. I remember when it was just a baby, back on April 26, 2007 when Henry Cates posted the first space carnival (oddly enough) on his Why Homeschool blog. Since then the carnival has been hosted by many different blogs (including mine a few times, though not very recently) and has expanded to cover a wide range of space and astronomy subjects.

Number 200 is hosted this week by Next Big Future. There are a lot of good posts, but my particular favorite is "Starship Fuel from the Outer System" from Centauri Dreams. It discusses the possible "mining" of Helium-3 from the atmosphere of Uranus. While the technology for this is a few years off (on several levels), it could provide fuel for fusion reactor-driven starships as well as a source of fusion fuel for Earth's energy needs. I've linked above to the beautiful image by Adrian Mann showing an He-3-harvesting "hot air" balloon above the clouds of Uranus's atmosphere.

Paul Simon Dazzles

2011-06-02T21:49:00.002-04:00

Wow, what a concert. I saw Paul Simon last night at the Citi Wang Theater in Boston, possibly one of the best concerts I've ever attended. Paul and his incredible eight-genius backing band played for nearly two hours, covering nearly every part of Paul's incredible career in about 24 songs. Nearly all of the band members played two or more instruments, including horns and the wide range of percussion used on songs from Graceland, Rhythm of the Saints, and the new So Beautiful or So What albums. At 69, Paul's voice, guitar playing, and stage presence are incredibly strong.The band was rock-solid on all the many styles of music that Paul's music incorporates, from delicate harmonies and background vocals on the Simon & Garfunkel classic "The Only Living Boy in New York" to the rollicking Zydeco of "That Was Your Mother" from Graceland.

A few of the songs brought on nostalgic tears - "The Sound of Silence" and "Only Living Boy" from the early days, "Peace Like a River" from the first solo album, "Still Crazy After All These Years" and "Slip Sliding Away" from the mid-seventies, and "Hearts and Bones" from 1983. I was thrilled to hear "The Obvious Child" from Rhythm of the Saints as well as five of the rhythmically and melodically rich songs from Graceland (Crazy Love, That Was Your Mother, Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes, Gumboots, and The Boy in the Bubble) - the band was amazing on these songs (they made great use of the two drummers plus supplemental percussion and horns played by three keyboard players). Paul and the band also pulled off some unusual sounds and musical effects on five of the songs from the new album (Dazzling Blue, So Beautiful or So What, Rewrite, The Afterlife, and the quietly haunting Questions for the Angels).

The sound system and engineering were also impressive, allowing all of these complex instrument sounds (plus vocals!) to remain clear and distinct. One surprise in the first encore was an acoustic version of George Harrison's "Here Comes the Sun" - as pretty as this was, I would have traded it for another one of Paul's own classics, perhaps "Mrs. Robinson" or "The Boxer" or "America," but that's OK. He has too many great songs to fit in one evening, and it was all wonderful. I was reminded again and again of the beauty and craft of Paul's songwriting, especially in the rhythms and the lyrics - the attention to every detail and the work needed to make it all sound so natural and inevitable. What an inspiration!

Skylon in Orbiter

2011-05-30T20:00:00.002-04:00

So Wikipedia tells me that the Reaction Engines Skylon proposal has been around for a very long time - how did I miss it? I guess the idea has heated up mostly since 2009 with the emergence of some funding. The new UK Space Egency/ESA report gives it another boost. It will still need a lot of funding, but Reaction Engines claims that it "will be able to repay its development costs, meet its servicing and operating costs and make profits for its operators whilst being an order of magnitude cheaper to customers than current space transportation systems." Here's hoping that all pans out (and that there's sufficient launch business to support this project as well as SpaceX and other private space ventures - so much depends on the costs-to-orbit they achieve). It would be really great to see a true space plane taking off from a runway, flying to orbit, and returning to the same runway - just like in the movies (and even without a pilot).

This article clearly explains some of the hybrid engine challenges. The Wikipedia article explains some of the smart thinking that has gone into keeping Skylon cool and safe for reentry (cool enough to allow an integral ceramic skin to do most of the work, although active cooling will probably be needed for the wings).It will still land as a glider like the space shuttle - no plans to retain fuel and re-start the air-breathing engines for landing.

I may have missed Skylon (until this very recent blog post), but members of the Orbiter community didn't and there is already a cool add-on version as well as some additional work based on that model. I downloaded the basic one by "inzane" and tried it out just a bit (mainly for screenshots). I wasn't able to make orbit on my first try - probably missed some steps in the instructions. Hey, it's new technology! It's also a very cool-looking 3D model.

Although Skylon is an unpiloted launch vehicle (essentially a huge UAV with some serious autopilot smarts), there have been some studies on possible passenger capabilities, and the Orbiter add-on features a passenger module which is visible in the screenshot above. I posted a few more screenshots on my Flickr page.

Carnival of Space #199

2011-05-30T10:37:00.003-04:00

The 199th Carnival of Space is hosted this week by Weirdwarp. There are some really cool posts this week, but I was especially intrigued by the mysterious black Skylon space plane, which was reported by Next Big Future. This unpiloted SSTO (single stage to orbit) vehicle has been proposed by a UK company, Reaction Engines, Ltd. (Skylon press release here, PDF). The news is that an ESA report commissioned by the UK Space Agency concluded "no impediments or critical items have been identified for either the SKYLON vehicle or the SABRE engine that are a block to further developments."

This is exciting stuff, the key to its possible feasibility being the SABRE hybrid air-breathing/rocket engine that would allow Skylon to operate like a jet airplane while within the denser part of the atmosphere, leading to an enormous reduction in the amount of oxidizer that must be carried. The report states that the current design has a gross take off weight of 275 metric tonnes, of which 220 tonnes are propellent, with the ability to place 12 tonnes into an equatorial low Earth orbit. This is something like 4.4% of the total which is pretty good, especially with a fully-reusable vehicle (the calculation for the soon-to-retire space shuttle is about 1.4%, not including the orbiter itself).

The Reaction Engines site says that Skylon is in the "proof of concept" stage, with development estimated at 10 years. There are obviously a few technical issues to overcome (materials, for one, I would imagine), but it's great that ESA at least sees no fundamental showstoppers in the Skylon proposal. Now to get it funded! Reaction Engines estimates development costs of about $10 billion (this seems pretty cheap, even for an unpiloted vehicle).

Bonus: finally a rocket ship that looks like one of Wernher von Braun and Chesley Bonestell's classic Colliers Magazine rocket ships from the 1950's! More or less. Check out the Skylon mission animation video.

Orbital Resonance and 2084 (Save Us, Elon!)

2011-05-29T16:20:00.002-04:00

I recently re-read Orbital Resonance by John Barnes, one of my favorite SF writers. This book is part of Barnes' "Kaleidoscope Century" series about which I have written before. Written in the early 1990's, the series imagines an alternate near-future in which a series of disasters have devastated Earth in the early twenty-first century (names such as Tailored Rice Blast, mutAIDS, the Eurowar, and the Great Die-Off suggest the scale of Earth's troubles). Space flight has advanced sufficiently to allow construction of some off-planet "lifeboats" including several space colonies formed from captured asteroids and an embryonic terraforming project on Mars. These space activities can only include a tiny fraction of Earth's population, but they provide hope that humanity can survive even if Earth does not. And of course they have their own troubles.

Orbital Resonance takes place aboard The Flying Dutchman, a huge space colony built and operated by NihonAmerica Corporation which is on a special "resonant" orbit that cycles between Earth and Mars, transporting cargo and colonists. The ship is largely self-sufficient and houses a permanent population of 7,200, most of whom have been born on the ship and are under 20 years old. Melpomene Murray is the narrator. Thirteen "ground years" old, she is one of these young ship-born members who know of life on Earth only from videos and from the stories of the parents. Space-ship engineering is quite important and advanced, but social engineering is equally important. While most adults manage to adjust to life in this confined, disciplined, variable-gravity environment, the kids have grown up on the ship, and their schooling and socialization have been tailored to help them cope and eventually take over from the adults here. They are the future. But has the social engineering been successful? That's the story of this book.

Of course psychology is still not an exact science, and when a new boy from Earth joins Mel's class, the social balance is disturbed in various ways. Despite their impressive skills and knowledge, these are after all still adolescents, with all the hormonal and other issues that implies. Mel doesn't consider herself to be special (that's part of the team-oriented socialization process), but it turns out that she and a few of the other kids are special, with fewer of the social/developmental controls that have been placed on most of the kids. The adults are grooming them for leadership positions. But the kids don't especially like the ways they have been manipulated. I'll leave the rest for you find out if you choose to read it (as I have done three times now).

Of course I love "space stuff" and there is plenty of it here, but the book is not primarily about space, nor is it primarily about Earth's disasters, though these form the essential backdrop for why this ship and its three sister-ships exist. I read another book recently that is explicitly concerned with Earth disasters, a $1.99 "Kindle Short" called 2084: An Oral History of the Great Warming by James Powell. There's really very little about space or any other advanced technologies in this book. Its premise is that we do more or less nothing about human contributions to climate change (i.e., the path we are on now), and that due to various plausible feedback loops and uncertainties in the climate models, we end up with a 6° C (10.8° F) average temperature rise and a one meter (3.3 feet) average sea level rise by 2050. A variety of bad things ensue, many of them indirect side effects of climate change. They are told as "remembered anecdotes" by eyewitnesses to events that took place over many years.

There are obvious ones like the loss of many of the world's low coastal cities (most of Florida's coastal cities as well as most of the Netherlands are lost, not to mention most of Bangladesh). Loss of water supplies devastates the US Southwest, sub-Saharan Africa, and many other areas and leads to wars over water supplies, including a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. There are so many mega-storms that they are no longer named, but numbered by year, like 2048-9, and a huge storm in 2042 inundates and destroys major parts of New York City. Most of the US mid-west becomes too warm and dry to grow wheat, while Canada's climate makes it the new breadbasket - and leads to invasion and war with the United States! This sounds implausible, but consider that problems with water, food, and immigration (huge numbers of climate refugees heading for Europe, USA, and other areas) have led to the rise of Fascist governments in many countries, including the USA. There's more - a total of 18 anecdotes in this brief, fictional "oral history."

It's not the greatest writing (e.g., I was annoyed by the abundance of "local color" foreign expressions that the author inserted in most anecdotes, apparently to remind you that this was not an American "speaking"), but it is very thought-provoking. It is something of a worst-case, because although we can't be sure that technology will save us, surely some of the developments of today will help, with bio-engineered fuels and solar desalinization, for example. I'm not assuming space colonies (though I certainly favor an off-planet insurance policy for mankind), but lower cost access to space combined with robotic tech could probably lead to practical solar power satellites that would greatly help the energy supply - I'm thinking SpaceX Falcon 9 Heavy. Yes, Elon Musk will save us! I know he can do it.

Simon & Simon & Sean

2011-05-25T18:04:00.000-04:00

It’s been a long time between blog posts. Aside from work and family, I’ve had a bit of a rough time since discovering in March that I had gallstones. Gallstones are often small and don’t present any problems, but when they do flare up, they can cause a lot of painful symptoms. Things got pretty bad in mid-April and I finally had my gallbladder removed on April 26. It’s relatively minor laparoscopic surgery these days, and I was lucky to receive excellent care, but it’s still pretty distracting. I’m mostly back to normal now.

As a still-aspiring-after-all-these-years singer-songwriter, I’ve always been a huge admirer and fan of Paul Simon. So I’m very excited that I will finally get to see him perform live at the Wang Center in Boston on June 1. I bought his recent album So Beautiful or So What when it came out in April, and I think it’s some of his best work, amazingly fresh and original -- so beautiful, and so what if he’s sixty-nine? There’s a wide-ranging interview with Paul in the April 2011 issue of Uncut Magazine (available online here). For all he’s accomplished, he comes across as incredibly modest and down to earth. He says, “Being a legend doesn’t mean anything other than that you’re old.” Perhaps it means a bit more than that in his case.

I recently discovered the music of Paul’s son, Harper Simon. Actually it was hiding in plain hearing on my iPod, at least one song from a Paste Magazine collection, “Berkeley Girl.” I had heard it before but hadn’t realized who it was (though it sounds a lot like a Simon & Garfunkel song). I checked out the rest of his 2009 solo album and found a lot to like. Harper was 37 when he made this first solo album. I found an interview where he explained that he just didn’t have that much to say in his twenties, though he had played in at least one band and had done other musical projects. Although he doesn’t aim to be known as “Paul Simon’s son,” it’s pretty hard to avoid that connection, and coolly enough, his dad even helped out on a couple of the songs on the album. Much of the album was recorded in Nashville, and it does have something of an alt-country feel on a few songs (he also sounds a bit like Elliott Smith at times). He admired the playing of some of the Nashville session players on favorite albums from the sixties, like Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, so he asked around to see if any of them were still playing. Sure enough, some of them were, so he got them on his album. One guitarist happened to have also played second acoustic guitar on the original S&G recording of "The Boxer." Small world?

Another recent find also involves the musical son of a legend (unfortunately not a living one). I occasionally search for my own music on Google, just to see what shows up. When I searched the other day for “Jardin du Luxembourg,” I found my album, but also a recent song with that title by Sean Ono Lennon. I quickly discovered a 2010 album by “Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger,” an acoustic duo made up of Lennon and his talented and lovely girlfriend Charlotte Kemp Muhl. Their songs are strangely beautiful, or maybe beautifully strange – ethereal vocals, fine harmonies, odd chord progressions and modulations. Good stuff. Check out their intimate and cute “Tiny Desk Concert” on NPR – Charlotte looks great, and Sean’s facial expressions look so much like his dad, it's kinda weird.

Cloud Music

2011-04-02T23:24:00.001-04:00

When I first read about Amazon's new Cloud Player, I thought it was a gimmick - I've got thousands of songs on a 500 GB pocket drive, backed up on two other external hard drives (not to mention 4,400 songs on my iPod Touch) - why do I need music in "the cloud" - which is just a gimmicky word for the remote storage and computing accessed through the internet, right? Right? Well, I am an occasional early adopter, as well as a sucker for marketing and cheap MP3 deals. The basic "cloud drive" offer is 5 GB of online storage for free, but if you buy any MP3 album from Amazon (something I do quite often anyway, usually on sale for cheap), they will give you 20 GB free for a year. And there was a Norah Jones album I was thinking of buying anyway for $2.99, so I gave it a try.

Although I use iTunes and the iPod Touch, I long ago converted to buying MP3's from Amazon rather than AAC's (or whatever they are called now) from iTunes. Same songs, often cheaper, and more portable, and now, Amazon will also back up your Amazon MP3 purchases on your "cloud drive" - for free. "Free" as in they don't charge your for the storage space used by new Amazon MP3 purchases - the 20 GB is only for music you upload (including MP3's previously purchased from Amazon - the free storage only applies to new MP3 purchases). This really adds value to something I was buying anyway (they even store free MP3's that I "buy" from Amazon - daily free songs plus many sampler and promotional albums).

I realize this sounds like a paid political announcement for Jeff Bezos, but I'm now really sold on this cloud thing. I've bought a few other MP3 albums on sale at Amazon and have even started to upload my own music to the Cloud Drive. I think it's really cool that my backup music storage can be independent of my own hardware, and that I can stream this music anywhere I can run a web browser (except on the iPod Touch, but there's plenty of music there anyway, plus Pandora and other internet radio music if I grow tired of my 4,400 songs). I can also download any of the music I have on the Cloud Drive any time I need to, which I will need to do for anything I plan to listen to on the iPod Touch (there is a Cloud Player app for Android devices, but I'm guessing that Apple will not approve an Amazon Cloud Player app any time soon). Of course it all depends on having an internet connection, but 90% of the time, I do. So it's really cool.

Amazing Kepler Exoplanet Graphic

2011-03-29T09:40:00.000-04:00

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day is a stunning graphical depiction of the results returned so far by the Kepler spacecraft. Kepler is staring at a small section of the sky within which it keeps track of the brightness of some 100,000 stars, watching for the slight change in light output that can indicate a transiting planet. The amazing graphic shown above shows the number of stars for which transits have been detected, their correct relative sizes and colors, and the correct numbers and relative sizes of the detected planets (multiple planets for some stars). Our own sun is shown for scale at the far right, below the top row of larger stars. If you zoom in, you can see the silhouettes of Jupiter and our very tiny Earth on the sun's face. There is an incredible amount of information in this single image - it could be in the class of the famous graphic depiction of Napolean's disastrous invasion of Russia.

Carnival of Space #190

2011-03-29T09:18:00.000-04:00

The latest carnival of space is hosted this week by Centauri Dreams. I was supposed to host this week but a family emergency came up over the weekend, and Paul graciously agreed to host in my place. It's a small but very interesting collection of articles this week.

Space Expo Noordwijk

2011-03-24T14:53:00.002-04:00

Last week I did one of my occasional whirlwind customer tours in Europe, visiting six customer sites in France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Sweden in five days. There wasn't much free time in the schedule, but one of the customers happened to be ESTEC (European Space Research and Technology Centre) in Noordwijk, Netherlands (close to Leiden, not far from Amsterdam), and luckily there was an hour or so to kill before heading to Amsterdam to catch a flight to Gothenburg, Sweden.

I say luckily, because ESTEC is also the site of Space Expo, a space museum that is also ESA's visitor center (the main Space Explo web site is in Dutch and has multiple pages and pictures - there's also an English site, but it's got very little content). This museum isn't as large as Cité de l’Espace (Space City), which I visited last summer in Toulouse, France, but it's pretty impressive nonetheless. In addition to the expected exhibits on the solar system, stars, space history, etc., there are a number of life-size satellite mock-ups suspended from the ceiling. There are also a number of interactive exhibits where you can launch simulated rockets and the like.

The ISS was represented by a cool model hanging from the ceiling (shown above with overexposed floodlights simulating a double-star solar system). But more impressive were the full size walk-through mock-ups of the Russian Zvezda and the European Columbus ISS modules (I realized again that the ISS is really, really big). There was also a life size Apollo Lunar Module mock-up on a simulated lunar surface with space-suited astronaut manikins for scale and (lack of?) atmosphere.

They have a nice collection of real space memorabilia including an Apollo moon rock, an airlock used on a shuttle Spacelab mission, and a section of the Hubble Space Telescope's first generation solar panels (returned on one of the servicing missions). There are some great large-scale models of Ariane launch vehicles (and full-size cutaway models of some Ariane rocket engines). I have a few additional Space Expo pictures on my Flickr site.

Finally I had to spend a few minutes in the gift shop where I couldn't resist buying a couple of 3D postcards of some of Saturn's moons (from Cassini imagery) as well as a book I will likely never read. It's a "graphic novel" of sorts, and it tells the story of Tania, a fictional European astronaut, as she makes her way through the selection and training program and finally into space. The illustrations are pretty good, and it's nice to have such a story told in graphic form. Unfortunately the text is only in Dutch, which limits my ability to follow all the details (it appears that this book was also published in English, French, and German). The picture at left is the last page of the comic section of the book (there's a final section with photos of real ESA astronauts and more detailed text, all of which I cannot read).

Korean Pocket Sundial

2011-02-20T13:20:00.000-05:00

Last week I hosted my company's annual international distributor meeting. One of my Korean guests was kind enough to bring me a small gift, something I had never seen before, a pocket sundial modeled on an ancient Korean sundial called Angbu Il-gu ("cauldron-like sundial"). According to this (what else?) Wikipedia article, the original version of this sundial was invented by Jang Yeong-sil and other Korean scientists sometime in the 1400's during the early Joseon Dynasty.The picture at the bottom of this article shows what the much larger original looked like (museum photo from Wikipedia Commons, courtesy Bernat).

The pocket sundial fortunately included some English notes, explaining that the 13 lines that are roughly perpendicular to the pointer are seasonal lines. The far right line is the winter solstice (lowest sun, longest shadows) while the leftmost line (aligned with the tip of the pointer in my photo) represents the summer solstice. Today is just about two months past the winter solstice, and the shadow's tip touches the second line. The lines that are roughly parallel to the pointer are time lines (half-hour increments), with the longest (center) line representing noon. This picture was take at 12:36 EST, and the shadow is well short of the 12:30 line, but the instructions also mention that some adjustment is needed for longitude, though the English explanation of this isn't very comprehensible. They also didn't mention the use of the compass, but I knew enough to align the red end of the compass needle with north.

I was surprised to get such a cool little gift, although I think my Korean friend knows that I have an interest in astronomy (or at least optics). I was also surprised that it is sunny enough today to test it!

(looks like this was taken right around the same month and time of day as my photo)

From Bozo to Watson

2011-02-19T22:12:00.001-05:00

I’m right on the cusp between insanely busy and merely crazy busy at work. So I thought I would take a breath and write a blog post, inspired by an amazing app I just bought for the iPod Touch.

Wikipedia may have its faults, with user-created content that often needs to be taken with a grain of skepticism. On the other hand, if you have an internet connection, it’s an incredibly broad collection of entry-level (and often in-depth) articles on just about anything you can think of. But what if you don’t have an internet connection? That may seem like a rare condition for many of us, but when I wrote this, I was on an airplane with no Wifi or mobile phone signal. Back on the ground, I walk around with an iPod Touch which provides excellent web access whenever I have a Wifi signal. I also have a BlackBerry “smart phone” which is great for email and which theoretically provides web access whenever I have a 3G signal. I say theoretically because the BlackBerry’s web browser totally sucks – it is slow and unable to load most web sites because it says they are “too big.” What’s an information junky to do?

The solution: clear 3 GB of space from my iPod Touch and spend $10 on an app called Wikipedia Offline, and voila, now I’ve got the whole English language Wikipedia in my pocket. More precisely, I have the main text for the entire Wikipedia as of September 2010. By default there are no pictures, though when you are online, you can download the latest version of any article and optionally save it with pictures (as I have shown here - you can also touch the globe button to display the full online version of the article you are viewing). The links to other Wikipedia articles are in there, as are many web links, but none of the “editorial” material that might help you judge whether the information is reliable or not.

Other than those limitations, it’s pretty much all in there, from Bozo the Clown to Watson (the AI program that recently defeated two human Jeopardy game show champions – I updated the article to include recent information on that televised match). And everything in between (A, X,Y,and Z entries are in there too). Orbital elements. Orbiter. Fluffernutter sandwiches. Jayne Mansfield (she did die in car accident, but she was not decapitated). Elton John. A wide range of obscure musical acts (not me, I’m too obscure even for Wikipedia), albums, and movies. Battle of Britain (battle, movie, flight sim, airfields, memorial, etc., etc.).

How is this possible? I mean, 3 gigabytes is a lot of data, and the file is heavily and cleverly compressed. But jeeze. The first movie on my flight was the recent animated film Megamind so I looked it up. It’s in there, with cast and plot summary, although it is listed as forthcoming since the main database is from September 2010. This whole offline Wikipedia thing is really quite astounding.

Carnival of Space #182

2011-01-29T11:51:00.000-05:00

After a brief hiatus, the Carnival of Space is back, now organized (and hosted this week) by Brian Wang of Next Big Future. Thanks to Brian for taking over, and big thanks to Fraser Cain of Universe Today who has organized the Carnival since fall 2007.

Rocket Science for Fun

2011-01-22T20:11:00.003-05:00

I'm making slow progress on the third edition edits for Go Play In Space for the Orbiter 2010 space flight simulator. I sometimes need to present various aspects of "rocket science" in the course of explaining the intricacies of maneuvering in space (otherwise known as orbital mechanics) in Orbiter. This has led me to look into how other authors handle these explanations, so I've revisited a favorite book and have bought a new one. My perspective is a bit more practical than for many general readers - I am trying to teach my readers how to operate realistically simulated spacecraft, so when they encounter things like ascending nodes, they want to know what they can do with them (like align the plane of their current orbit with that of the ISS in preparation for rendezvous and docking), whereas other readers might just say, "that's nice" and turn the page.

The new book is It's ONLY Rocket Science by Lucy Rogers (I bought the Kindle version). Dr. Rogers is a British mechanical engineer and freelance journalist on space and astronomy topics (perhaps among others).She says on her website that she aims to write about science in plain English, and she pretty much succeeds in this book. For example, her explanations of orbital elements, Lagrange points, and ground tracks are quite clear and include some simple illustrations (including ones for Molniya and geosynchronous orbits). On the other hand, her explanation of rendezvous and docking is rather too brief, and could use some more illustrations for someone who wants the background needed to actually do rendezvous and docking in a real spacecraft (or in Orbiter, for most of us). The book also covers the space environment, rockets and spacecraft, types of missions, propulsion systems, communications, humans in space, and other topics in addition to the basics of orbital mechanics. There's a website with information and book excerpts here.

My old favorite is Wayne Lee's To Rise From Earth (Second Edition), which is sadly out of print (used copies are available on Amazon). I wrote about this book in some detail in 2006. The subtitle "an easy-to-understand guide to spaceflight" is really true, and Lee (who works as an interplanetary space flight engineer at JPL) covers a lot of ground in this book, including a lot of space history with detailed information on the Apollo program and the space shuttle. In the orbital mechanics area, the explanations are detailed, and there are many excellent color illustrations that support the explanations. Rendezvous and docking and ground track explanations are especially well done. As I wrote in 2006:

Both the book and Orbiter provide an essentially non-mathematical introduction to space flight - the book approaches this through geometry, using a large number of excellent diagrams as well as clear analogies and other text descriptions and many photographs. Orbiter takes the first-person approach of putting you in the pilot's seat and providing various instruments to guide you as you control the spacecraft to change orbits, rendezvous with another spacecraft, or fly to the Moon or to Mars.

So if you are a budding astronaut (or Orbinaut), which book should you choose? Ideally you should read both - Rogers covers some topics better than Lee (for example, Lagrange points) and you may find some explanations to be clearer in spite of the small number of illustrations. But if you want to really understand how orbits work and how you change them to get where you want to get in space, you should grab a copy of Wayne Lee's book before the used copies run out. Rogers' 2008 book is still in print (paper and Kindle).

New Shuttle Fleet for Orbiter

2011-01-14T23:40:00.001-05:00

In my not-so-copious spare time, I am working on the 2010 update to Go Play In Space, the tutorial and exploration guide e-book that I wrote for the free Orbiter space flight simulator (with help from Andy McSorley on the second edition in 2006, and now from Mark Paton on the 2010 edition). Orbiter has a 2010 edition described here, with enough new and changed features to justify a new edition of Go Play.

The new edition will add a chapter on re-entry (written by Mark), and the rendezvous and docking chapter will use the supplied shuttle Atlantis spacecraft rather than the more powerful (but fictional) Deltaglider spacecraft used in the second edition. It's more realistic in that it's based on a launch (using a launch autopilot written in Orbiter's new scripting language), rendezvous, and docking scenario that happens in real life, although sadly not for much longer. I'm glad to finally be adding some shuttle operations to Go Play In Space.

Speaking of flying the shuttle in Orbiter, there's a brand-new edition out of the amazing Shuttle Fleet add-on for Orbiter 2010-P1 (Shuttle Fleet 4.7 by David413). I've only just downloaded and installed it, but it looks great. It includes support for local light sources which should improve the already impressive visuals. I will be discussing the Shuttle Fleet in the add-on chapter of the new Go Play In Space. The picture above is a nostalgic Shuttle Fleet screen shot of STS-1, the very first flight of the first operational shuttle, Columbia, April 12, 1981. Notice the white-painted external tank that was used on the early shuttle missions (they stopped painting the tanks on later flights to save weight, leaving the now familiar rusty orange color of the insulating foam).

Cool blog: Everybody's Dummy

2011-01-07T08:23:00.000-05:00

Everybody's Dummy is a cool music blog. A few times a week it posts a detailed review of a classic album. I've discovered or rediscovered some great music by artists such as Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Elvis Costello, and Dire Straits. Mainstream artists to be sure, but I don't know everything they have ever done, and it's cool to find an overlooked gem, or just to read an insightful review of an old favorite. The title is from a quote by Lester Bangs, "I'm nobody's dummy. I'm everybody's dummy. I believe everything I read, see, and hear."

New Year, (Slightly) New Look

2011-01-06T22:03:00.001-05:00

Happy new year! I'm back to a crazy work schedule, but every once in a while I get obsessed with some strange little thing. Tonight it was a new feature of Blogger, the ability to define your own blog template background image. I had a perfectly good stock image of the Earth, but was that enough? Of course not! I decided I needed a collage of Orbiter images instead (plus one picture I took of the real STS-118 launch). They said to make it 1800 x 1600 to allow for full screen, and I tried a couple of variations before arriving at the one shown here and in the background. Some of the edges are OK (depending on how your window is sized), but you really can't tell in the background that the upper left image is a closeup of the shuttle. I also just discovered that the 1800x1600 doesn't really fill the screen when Safari scales the web page for the iPod Touch. Oh well, it will have to do for now.

Books of 2010 and Beyond

2010-12-31T18:54:00.001-05:00

This hasn't been a great blogging year for me - I like to think it's quality more than quantity that counts, but I'm not sure I can back that up! I don't think I can muster a full 2010 year/blog retrospective tonight, but it will be nice to break 100 posts, so I'll write about the one constant throughout my life: books!

Even in a busy year I still manage to read quite a few books (and buy more than I read). Part of the reason is the Kindle app on the iPod Touch. Thanks to this, I can carry around a library of 50-some books that I can easily read on planes or in small bites during many of life's spare moments (when I'm not landing the space shuttle, of course). People ask me how I can read for long periods on such a small screen, but it really doesn't bother me at all. A favorite of the books I read this year on Kindle was Packing for Mars by Mary Roach (so cool and funny, I'm now reading her Bonk, about guess what? ...also informative and hilarious). I also loved Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist, 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die (more of a browse than a read, but great), Einstein by Walter Isaacson, Can't Buy Me Love (Beatles!) by Jonathon Gould, Eifelheim by Michael Flynn (unusual first contact SF set in the Middle Ages), Girls Like Us (bio of Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon) by Sheila Klein, Cold Choices by Larry Bond (a rare return to the once favorite techno-thriller genre), and Edenborn by Nick Sagan (second volume of his Idlewild SF trilogy - read the other two in paper).

I read a few other books on paper too, including a biography of Paul McCartney by Peter Carlin and Whole Earth Discipline (an environmental eye-opener!) by Stewart Brand. I now usually buy paper books if the Kindle version is unavailable, or if it's a book I want to share with people (like Brand's), or if it's a bargain book. Or a beautiful thing like Imagining Space. Or for some other reason! Currently I'm reading 3 or 4 books on the iPod plus Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf in paper (a fascinating study of how the brain learned to read). My latest Kindle buy was Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. This is an old fave I have read twice, but I love Bryson, and I gave my paper copy to my brother, probably just an excuse to have Bryson's book in my pocket for brief dips into this cool and funny history of science and technology.

Wow, I read more than I thought this year. There are worse habits (and I have a few of those too).

Beatles LOVE and Other Music

2010-12-31T18:08:00.000-05:00

Recently I read something that reminded me of the Beatles LOVE, the Cirque du Soleil show that I saw in Las Vegas in 2008. I loved that show, but for some reason I never got the soundtrack music from it, so a couple of weeks ago I bought an inexpensive used CD on Amazon and discovered that it's quite magical in its own way, even for someone who has all the other Beatles recordings ever made (more or less). LOVE is a loving mash-up of many of the Beatles songs, created by Beatles producer George Martin and his son Giles Martin from the original multi-track masters. It's really a new perspective on some of the Beatles songs.

2010 has been a pretty good music year for me. In June I completed and released my own second CD, Message From Tomorrow, to general non-recognition, but that's OK - like this blog, my music is something I do mainly for me while hoping a few other people will also enjoy it. I also discovered a lot of new music from Broken Bells, Local Natives, Arcade Fire, Winterpills, Aqualung, A Fine Frenzy, Darrell Scott, and others, in addition to buying and starting to listen to a boatload of classical music collections that expanded my horizons on composers including Dvorak, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Grieg, and others. I also saw James Taylor and Carole King in concert - a great and nostalgic time last summer.

Sometime in 2011, I plan to replace my ~2002 home PC so I can run some more recent recording software like Sonar X1 and start working on my next album (maybe play with some recent flight sims too). I have a few older songs I'd like to rediscover and perhaps re-invent, and I'd also like to experiment some more with samples and multi-track vocals. When I start to play with music, I tend to also write new songs (the past few months have not been very conducive to this with my brain saturated with work stuff). I almost ordered a new PC a couple of weeks ago then realized that I would need the time and brain capacity to play with it, so I'll wait until spring or so.

The Awesome Space Shuttle

2010-12-31T13:39:00.000-05:00

It's hard to believe that there are now only two or three space shuttle flights left and that these amazing machines will be retired by the middle of 2011. Despite the tragic losses of Challenger and Columbia, this ahead-of-its-time space plane has had an incredible career with 132 space flights since 1981. I've spent a lot of time with shuttle simulations the last few weeks - in the F-SIM Space Shuttle landing app on the iPod Touch, as well as in Orbiter, working to update my free Go Play In Space e-book to a third edition (probably will be ready by early March 2011). One change will be to the rendezvous/docking chapter which will use the included Atlantis shuttle model instead of the futuristic Deltaglider that is used in the rest of the examples.It will follow a tutorial flight recording done by Martin Schweiger, Orbiter's author. It also shows off Orbiter 2010's new Lua scripting capability with the shuttle launch to orbit controlled by a Lua script autopilot.

I found the video shown here through the free NASA App on the iPod Touch - it's a great way to keep track of missions and to find pictures and videos on NASA's various sites. This narrated video consists mainly of video clips from various high-speed cameras that NASA uses for engineering diagnostics on shuttle launches. Because of the high recorded frame rate, they play back in slow motion, so you can see many of the intricate events that take place in seconds on every shuttle launch. They are always impressive and sometimes beautiful.

My Tiny ISS Connection

2010-12-30T18:22:00.002-05:00

In March 2009, I exhibited at the annual Space Expo held at the New England Air Museum at Bradley Airport, Connecticut. As I often have done, I used Orbiter to demonstrate some aspects of space flight, with a second computer set up with a joy stick to allow attendees (mostly kids) to have a try at landing a simulated space shuttle from final approach. This is a good hands-on demo because it only requires two controls (the joystick and the G key, to drop the gear). But it's harder than it looks.

Unfortunately, this demo was so popular, that I only managed to catch about 5 minutes of a talk by the Space Expo's special guest, astronaut Cady Coleman. But fortunately, Col. Coleman was kind enough to take a some time at the end of the day to visit with some of the exhibitors, including me. We chatted for a few minutes, and I told her about Orbiter in hopes that she would take some interest in this for educational purposes (or perhaps share it with some colleagues at NASA). She was quite interested to see Orbiter (she said "why didn't I know about this?"), and she asked me to send her some information, which of course I did. I was pretty happy when she replied the next day to my email:

Bruce – it was a pleasure to meet you – and I look forward to being in touch. I can’t wait to start playing – and am soooo thankful that a manual exists…. I’m sure I’ll still have questions, knowing me! My to-do list is a bit long these days – so I may not get to try it out right away - but this is really really neat stuff. I’m assuming that you won’t mind if I share it with other folks in my office? Thanks for taking the time to write – not to mention taking the time to come to the event. I thought it was a great event – although I’ll tell you that I slept well on Sunday night…. I’m sure you did as well. It is good work – but takes a lot out of you! Thanks again - Cady

...but I didn't expect to hear much more for a while, once I realized that she was already preparing for a late 2010 Soyuz flight to the ISS. On December 15, she launched on that flight, and she is now part of the Expedition 26 crew of the International Space Station (here are some of her thoughts just before she launched). I also learned today that she actually lives not far from me, in Western Massachusetts (when she's not in Houston, Russia, or space!). So it's not like Cady Coleman and I are best friends or anything, but it is pretty cool to have even this tiny connection to the ISS. Sometime after she gets back to Earth next May, I'll follow up on that email.

The video below features the ISS Expedition 26 Commander Scott Kelly of NASA and Flight Engineers Cady Coleman of NASA and Paolo Nespoli of the European Space Agency offering Christmas and New Year's greetings to all people on Earth on Dec. 21.

Nice EP from Winterpills

2010-12-12T21:44:00.002-05:00

Winterpills is a cool band from Northampton, MA. I've been listening to their music since their first album in 2005. I've also enjoyed several solo albums by Winterpills singer/songwriter Philip Price as well as "Robot Stories" from his previous band The Maggies. Today on the radio I heard someone mention "new Winterpills," so I looked around and found that they released a new 6-song EP back in October, "Tuxedo of Ashes." It's really good - haunting, harmony-laden, mostly acoustic music. They might remind you a bit of Iron & Wine, gentle music that's tougher than it sounds. Good stuff.

More iPod Shuttle (Landing Tips)

2010-12-12T17:27:00.000-05:00

I'm still obsessed with F-SIM Space Shuttle on the iPod Touch. Now that I'm a seasoned pro with some 10 hours (!) of flight time and at least one "good" landing (with 26 "safe" landings, 54 "hard" landings, and an embarrassing number of crash landings), here are a few things I've learned along the way. While it may seem odd that someone with such a poor record and slow learning curve has the audacity to offer landing tips to others, here's the thing: I've made these mistakes enough times to notice what they are, and if you can avoid some of them as a result, you'll be ahead of the game. This only applies to "final approach" landings. I've done a few full HAC approaches, but I still really suck at those, so too soon to give tips.

Read the "help" landing tutorial and watch a few Autoland demos, paying careful attention to the flight path marker (FPM) and approach cues in the HUD (the tutorial explains these with pictures). After you've landed a few times, also read the landing notes in part 2 of the help - good tips, but you'll need some experience to recognize them.
If you don't let the FPM get far from where it should be (and you shouldn't), the range of tilt and rotation motions you need is very small. The iPod Touch is so light, it's very easy to make motions you don't want that can really throw off your approach. I find I have to brace my elbows against my body and cradle the iPod carefully to keep it steady and in balance. And have my eyes very close to the screen.
Make very small adjustments, and don't ever let the FPM get far from the guidance diamond or the flare cues (small triangles).
Get lined up with the runway center line right away, and keep it lined up. I always try to do this but still sometimes end up off-center when I'm below 500 feet (maybe cross wind?). Sometimes I can correct this, but it's bad to have to try and I often fail. You don't see the real shuttle banking around on short final - you should be wings-level once you are below 1000 feet.
The FPM shows where the shuttle is heading. If you let it get above the horizon when you flare, you will gain altitude and will probably have trouble with line-up (a slow shuttle doesn't have great control authority) or a soft enough landing.
You seem to get more "good landing" credit for landing in the 200' touchdown zone than for being on-centerline. My one "good landing" was in the zone but somewhat off-center for 187,000 points. My best "safe" landing was 370,000 points and was well centered, but outside the landing zone.
If you use "tilt" for brakes (rather than manual brakes which is an option), once the nose wheel touches down, tilting forward provides more braking. But don't do it right away lest you slam the nose wheel down too hard.

The picture above is an animated GIF (might have to click on it) of an Autoland demo at KSC at night, passing through clouds (not real time - just captured frames at 0.8 sec intervals). I love that effect, when the KSC ground lights pop out as you pass through the cloud deck (very quickly and steeply, 20 degree approach, remember) . This is a great little sim. Reminds of the old days (~2000) when I used to land a simulated F/A-18 Super Hornet on a carrier at night in Jane's F/A-18 flight sim. I wasn't very good at that either, but it was also fun. I'm glad I was better at landing real Cessna 152's (when I was flying a few years ago) than I've been at landing simulated Hornets and space shuttles. Guess it helps to have your life on the line! And to be approaching at 67 knots rather than 150 to 300 knots.

My Doors Memory, Corrected

2010-12-09T22:46:00.001-05:00

I just happened to read that departing Florida Governor Charlie Crist has pardoned the late, great Jim Morrison for his 1970 conviction on charges of indecent exposure and profanity. Whether or not Jim actually exposed himself on stage at a March 1969 Miami Doors concert, this posthumous pardon will really not do much for his overall image as a drug- and alcohol-crazed wild child. But it did prompt me to check on something and to correct my personal historical and concert record.

I have always told a story of how I had cleverly convinced my mother to take a friend and me to a Doors concert at Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC) in the summer of 1968 or 1969, when I was in high school. The setup was that she had taken the family to see Peter, Paul, & Mary at SPAC the previous summer, and wasn't that a great time? OK, so the Doors are a little different kind of music, but it will still be fun. And somehow I missed mentioning the bit on Jim being arrested in Miami for lewd behavior on stage. She agreed, and we went to the concert. It was the loudest thing I had ever heard (though still great, I thought), and many people were smoking as well as sitting on the grass all around us. My mother was really pissed. No more concerts for me!

It turns out the concert we attended was September 1, 1968 (I was 15 at the time), and the infamous Miami bust had not happened yet. I should have realized this because in the summer of 1969 I was at a six-week NSF Science Student Training Program at Ohio University, where I watched with a bunch of fellow high school science nerds from all over America as Neil and Buzz cavorted on the moon . That was great. But it was not the Doors summer. In August of that year I had a crappy summer job washing dishes at a Howard Johnson in Lake George, NY (talk about coming down to Earth). Two of my co-workers offered me a ride to a weekend concert in Bethel, NY that would later be known as Woodstock. But I knew my parents would never go for that after the Doors experience, and besides I needed to earn money to buy some hippy clothes for my upcoming senior year. So I passed on that one. Oh well.

Carnival of Space #180

2010-12-09T21:51:00.001-05:00

I've missed reading, reporting, and submitting posts for a bunch of space carnivals this year. Now I'm finally starting to poke my head up and look around, and hey, there's a lot of cool space and astronomy stuff being blogged every day (and on some of the cold, clear nights we've had recently, there's a lot of cool stuff to see in the actual sky too - nice to see you back, Mr. Orion!). This week the Carnival of Space is hosted by Starry Critters. Check it out. My post came in as a stocking stuffer suggestion, and given the time of the year (and the product fanboy nature of my post), that's OK with me.

Congrats to SpaceX!

2010-12-08T22:50:00.000-05:00

Congratulations to SpaceX on today's successful first test launch for NASA's COTS program of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon cargo spacecraft. The (unmanned) Dragon was successfully recovered in the Pacific off the coast of Southern California. As SpaceX points out, only six other "entities" have pulled off this full operation (launch, orbit, and recover spacecraft) - and they are all countries or groups of countries (USSR/Russia, USA, China, Japan, European Space Agency, and India). Go private space!

F-SIM Shuttle Obsession

2010-12-08T22:28:00.002-05:00

I've now got about 6 hours of "flight time" in F-SIM Space Shuttle on the iPod Touch - which is a lot of flights at about 2 minutes each (about 165 flights). I'm still mainly doing final approaches, trying to become consistent enough to get mostly "safe" (and eventually "good" and "perfect") landings and fewer "hard" landings (but still a fair amount of "crash" landings when I lose focus). So far my top score is 193,000 - nowhere near the one million that's apparently possible on a really perfect landing. I wish I had a faster learning curve, but it's still fun. OK, an obsession, but fun. It really requires close concentration and a delicate, balanced touch when tilting the very low-mass iPod Touch to control your flight.It also helps to read the instructions and to watch the Autoland demo multiple times. Every time I do I notice some other little point that helps me improve. I'm still a little weak on the final flare - timing and amount, and also drifting right or left on that pull. It's very touchy.

One thing I did was to look up some HUD video of real shuttle landings on YouTube (here's a good example, and this one starts at about 80K feet at about Mach 2, before the entry to the HAC, and has a lot of pilot conversation). This really confirms the excellent realism of the HUD and the overall "sight picture" and speed sensation in the sim.

The picture above is a real HUD shot from an approach to runway 33 at KSC, 8000 feet, about 300 knots. Below is a similar situation in F-SIM Shuttle (same runway, 6500 feet, 300 knots, picture cropped to approximate field of view of the above picture):

Unfortunately the runway overlay is still on in this shot, but turned off in the real screen shot (I only seem to be able to make screen shots in the Autoland demo, not on my live flights and it's hard to get exactly the same conditions). The HUD frame (needed for orientation on a tilting screen) and symbology brightness are also different, but you can still see the realism.

Insanely Awesome Human Flight

2010-12-05T19:40:00.001-05:00

These wingsuit guys are totally insane and yet this human-scale version of the antics of Rocky the Flying Squirrel is one of the most awesome videos I have ever seen (HD version here).

iPod Shuttle

2010-12-03T23:45:00.002-05:00

The title is correct, iPod shuttle, not shuffle. I just bought what is perhaps the coolest iPhone/iPod Touch app yet, F-SIM Space Shuttle, an excellent Space Shuttle landing simulator. You fly it by tilting and rotating the whole device - the accelerometers are sensitive enough to control it with great precision. The question is, is the player sensitive enough to control it with the needed precision? So far the answer for me is "not quite," but after a couple of dozen final approach flights, I'm starting to make hard landings instead of crash landings. Still a ways to go for safe or perfect landings, but there is hope for my not-as-young-as-they-used-to-be reflexes and learning curve. Then I can take on flying the full approach in the HAC (heading alignment cone) from 20 to 50 thousand feet above Kennedy or Edwards. This little sim features what seems to be a pretty nice flight model and it offers day and night landings, clouds, and wind to keep things interesting. Since a shuttle final approach lasts something like 2 minutes, you can crash (I mean land) a lot of times in a half hour session of goofing off (a full approach is about 5 minutes).

The sim currently lacks external views and a replay function, but the developer is working on these. Not bad for $1.99 - that's right, a flight sim for two bucks! Of course it's a very limited domain (only the last few minutes of atmospheric flight, unlike Orbiter which simulates many phases of shuttle operations, from launch to docking to re-entry and landing). But Orbiter doesn't fit in my pocket like the iPod Touch (and Orbiter doesn't score your landing quality the way this sim does - part of the game-like quality that makes it quite addictive if you are into flying stuff). It has great audio (recorded from actual shuttle flights), though the script does get a little repetitive. There is a virtual cockpit mode, but I prefer the fixed front view - there's enough moving around without moving your eye position too.

As with real flight and real landings (which I sadly have not performed very recently), one key seems to be making very small adjustments and corrections sooner rather than big ones later. Unlike most landing situations, there's no engine and no opportunity for a go-around or even a flight path adjustment with power.But the HUD gives you a lot of visual cues, and if you have a light touch on the accelerometers, you can keep everything happy and get the shuttle on the runway in one piece most of the time.

UPDATE: I just saw screen shots of the iPad version of this app. Really amazing visuals. Could this be the reason to get an iPad? Probably not. At least not until the second generation iPad comes out. The main advantage of the iPod Touch is that it is pocket size so my Kindle books, New York Times, music, video, WiFi apps, and now space shuttle sim are always available.

2001: Aries at Clavius #3

2010-11-30T21:59:00.002-05:00

2001: Aries at Clavius #3, originally uploaded by FlyingSinger.

I just renewed my Flickr Pro account for another year and was looking through my "photos" (most of them are actually Orbiter screen shots). This is one of my favorites, recreating a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey (using the great World of 2001 add-on). The Aries moon shuttle is making a near-vertical approach to Clavius Base. The animated dome is retracting.

Interview with The Creator...

2010-11-30T21:52:00.000-05:00

...the Creator of Orbiter, that is. This is another late-to-the-party thing for me as an unfortunately inactive Orbiter fan (hey, I've been busy) - a June 2010 interview with Dr. Martin Schweiger, the creator and maintainer of the wonderful, free Orbiter 2010 space flight simulator.

Cheap Music Binge

2010-11-30T21:45:00.000-05:00

I like the week of Thanksgiving because it's a good time to stock up on cheap MP3 albums at Amazon. In the past week I've bought a few MP3 albums for just $1.99, some of them amazingly good. I'm especially loving The Suburbs by Arcade Fire and the latest X5 classical collection, "The 99 Most Essential Violin Masterpieces" (it's gone up to $2.49 but still an amazing bargain). Most of the pop/rock albums are back to regular prices now. But many of the X5 Classical collections are still available for $1.99 or so.

Orbiter 2010 Patch 1

2010-11-29T23:08:00.011-05:00

To top off an already busy and exciting year (my older daughter's wedding, finishing my second CD, building an addition on our house), my company was acquired a month or so ago, and now I am busier at work than I have been in years. Evenings, weekends, sleepless nights, travel, culture shock, O.B.S. (Obsessive Blackberry Syndrome) - it's quite a ride. I'm hoping the major transition will only last for a few months so I can eventually get some brain cells back for other things like songwriting and blogging (seeing as this is only my second post in November and it's the 29th).

In the meantime, I did spend a little time this past weekend catching up on Orbiter 2010 developments, including the release at the end of August of the first patch for the 2010 version (I only missed it by three months). In addition to various bug fixes and minor improvements, Orbiter 2010-P1 offers optional celestial background images (not my cup of tea) and the surprisingly dramatic feature of localized light sources, such as docking lights on a spacecraft (see Flash video capture above), or rocket exhaust lighting up the launchpad. As an "optics dude," I especially admire these dynamic lighting effects.When combined with higher resolution Earth textures (L11 for all of Earth, L14 for Florida) and other visual tweaks, Orbiter's 3D space world is more beautiful than ever, and as always, free for the downloading. I haven't had time to look at add-ons, except to notice that the always amazing Shuttle Fleet and ISS Fleet have already been updated for Orbiter 2010.

I've got a couple of weeks off from December 20 to 31, so I'm thinking of running through my Go Play In Space book in Orbiter 2010, to make sure everything works and maybe even do some minor (or even major, if I get inspired) updates to create a third edition of Go Play for Orbiter 2010. Stay tuned...

The picture below shows the improved Earth surface night lighting, at least for Florida (where daylight L14 textures are provided). It looks pretty cool.

Sitting On Top of the World

2010-11-29T22:37:00.002-05:00

This has to be one of my absolute favorite space photos, a picture of astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson looking at the Earth through the recently added cupola windows on the ISS. Reminds me of the old blues/Cream song "Sitting on Top of the World." I would love to experience that view someday. This was NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day on November 15.

Carnival of Space 172

2010-10-06T10:41:00.000-04:00

The Carnival of Space is hosted this week by Lights in the Dark. It's an especially interesting range of topics this time.

More Cheap Classical Music

2010-10-06T10:30:00.000-04:00

As I wrote back in July, there is an excellent series of "99 most essential" works from various classical composers offered as MP3 collections from X5 Music Group. The regular prices are in the $6 to $8 range, which is a good deal for many hours of quality classical music. But Amazon sometimes offers introductory specials on new collections for around $2, which is a crazy good deal (about 2 cents per musical piece).

Recently two new composer collections were released, Dvorák ($2.49) and Grieg ($1.99). I had only heard a few of their best known works before, so I was happy to expand my knowledge and my music collection for just a couple of bucks. The MP3 sound quality is good and most of the multi-movement works are included in full (all movements in order), though there are also some excerpts.

Imagining Space 1950-2050

2010-10-02T22:36:00.000-04:00

Wow, I'm beating my last month's blog post output in one day this month (3 posts wasn't hard to top). I don't know how I learned about this book, but I ordered a cheap used copy and it arrived the other day (in great condition - I still love Amazon's third-party used book sellers, even as I spend more and more of my book dollars on e-books). Imagining Space (Achievements - Predictions - Possibilities, 1950-2050) was written by Roger Launius and Howard McCurdy and published in 2001. The text is well written and surprisingly relevant considering all that has happened in the last nine years. The working assumption is that commercial ventures will dominate space development in the first half of the twenty-first century. Not that there won't be setbacks, and we're still a few years from an orbiting Hilton, but that seems to be starting to happen with the current redirection of NASA. It's still a few years to 2050.

The text is good, but the special treat is the great selection of images. There are some photographs but most of the illustrations are paintings by space artists starting of course with the great Chesley Bonestell, who practically defined the space age with his paintings and magazine illustrations in the 1950's. This sort of colorful, large format book still needs to be paper, and preferably hard cover (though I imagine it would look pretty good on an iPad).

Moon (the movie) Revisited

2010-10-02T22:06:00.001-04:00

I saw the movie "Moon" on an international flight some months back. It was seat-back video in economy on a 777, so we're not talking big screen here. I was probably tired too. I wanted to like it, but I thought it was stupid. When it showed up as a streaming Netflix movie (in HD), I decided to give it a no-cost second chance. I'm glad I did, because on a good size screen, the visuals were really cool and "realistic" in a 2001 sort of way. I liked Sam Rockwell's character, and this time I caught the early clues as to what was going on, so it didn't seem quite so arbitrary and confusing. Still quite implausible, but it paid off my suspension of disbelief well enough to forgive the original premise.

That premise is a lunar far-side Helium-3 mining base (in the semi-near future) that is essentially 100% robotically operated, except for a single human troubleshooter employee who is stationed there alone for a three-year tour, during which the lunar communication relay satellite that would allow direct communication with Earth seems to always be out of commission. I won't spoil it otherwise, but Sam eventually figures it out, with some significant help from his sidekick, a robot named Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey). Part of what's implausible is that with robotic AI technology as smart and sensitive as Gerty, why couldn't the base be completely robotic (with some help from telepresence systems that would allow Earth or lunar near-side humans to do the troubleshooting without living in total isolation for three years - or something like that).

One parallel with 2001 is a robotic assistant who (which?) goes crazy. Unlike HAL, Gerty doesn't become a psychotic murderer, but he does go so far outside of any conceivable programming that you could only call it crazy helpful (it's nice when your robot buddy tells you how to selectively erase some of his memories to prevent the boss humans from learning about something you're trying to hide that he/it would otherwise have recorded and would report). But hey, it's just a movie, and a pretty enjoyable (though sad) one at that.

CK12.org FlexBooks - Very Cool!

2010-10-02T16:28:00.001-04:00

I stumbled on this while looking through Amazon's list of free e-books for Kindle. I've gotten some really amazing free books since I started using the Kindle apps on my iPod Touch and PC, so I sometimes check. Many of the free ones are public domain books, classics and others, but sometimes you find recent books that publishers are giving away to promote an author or a series (this is how I discovered Naomi Novik's great "Napoleonic Wars with dragons" Temeraire series).

This time I found some interesting free science textbooks from something called ck12.org. I downloaded several (earth science, "people's physics," nanotechnology, calculus, biology) and started reading one on "21st century physics" that is really interesting and well written*, with a sort of dialog format on subjects including gravitation, nuclear energy, particle physics, biophysics (medical imaging), etc. This is apparently intended to supplement basic physics topics found in standard textbooks with updated material on diverse, interesting topics and many web links. But who is offering this? I found this on the web site:

CK-12 Foundation is a non-profit organization with a mission to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the U.S. and worldwide. Using an open-content, web-based collaborative model termed the "FlexBook," CK-12 intends to pioneer the generation and distribution of high quality educational content that will serve both as core text as well as provide an adaptive environment for learning.

Cool. I also watched a video and found that these FlexBooks can be viewed in various formats, printed, and even customized by teachers! Wow. This is good. I will learn more.

* the "well written" part varies by topic, with each chapter of this book written by a different author. I just read a chapter on on nanoscience that has several serious errors that completely change the meaning of some sentences. Textbooks need editors, even if they are free electronic textbooks.

Darrell Scott & A Fine Frenzy

2010-10-02T15:50:00.000-04:00

Here are a couple of recent musical discoveries. I've known Darrell Scott from one of his earlier albums ("Real Time," with Tim O'Brien) and from a couple of songs of his recorded by the Dixie Chicks (especially "Long Time Gone" from the Real Time album). But I recently bought his 2010 album "A Crooked Road," which is a real gem. I especially love the title track, so much so that I'm learning it to add to my repertoire of cover songs. The lyrics are great. The live radio performance shown in the video above is a bit different from the album version which has a guitar part in the style of McCartney's "Blackbird," but the live version is easier to play (he's tuned down a half-step in case you want to try it).

The other discovery is a singer-songwriter who calls herself A Fine Frenzy (actually Alison Sudol). She writes gorgeous melodies, and her lyrics and voice are nice too. "One Cell in the Sea" (2007) and "Bomb in a Birdcage" (2009) are both very good albums. She's something like 22 years old.

Carnival of Space #170

2010-09-20T17:21:00.000-04:00

I've been a Very Bad Blogger recently. Aside from work and a doggie health crisis, I'm still pretty infatuated with HDTV/Blu-Ray and all the cool stuff streaming through our Netflix "Instant Queue." Things like the 2008 PBS documentary Carrier (10 episodes about the USS Nimitz), In Search of Beethoven, Imagine: John Lennon, and It Might Get Loud (musical conversations with guitarists Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White). Not much space stuff unless you count The Iron Giant (an animated favorite that looks great in HD). I also have the 2009 Sam Rockwell movie Moon in my queue. I saw it once on an airplane and although I didn't love it, I'd like to see it on a bigger screen.

So no wonder there's no time for blogging! But space blogging by other people marches on, as you will quickly see from this week's Carnival of Space #170, hosted by National Geographic's Breaking Orbit blog.

JPL Solar System Ambassadors: Sign-up Time

2010-09-07T13:47:00.000-04:00

The JPL Solar System Ambassador program is for volunteers (non-NASA employees) who wish to be involved in educational and community outreach related to space exploration. Provided materials (mostly web-based) and telephone briefings tend to be mostly related to JPL programs, but ambassadors are free to define their own presentation subjects and styles. I've been in this program since 2007, and I have really enjoyed doing presentations at schools, libraries, museums, and scouting events. I personally tend to use a lot of simulation software (especially Orbiter and Stellarium) in my presentations, which is purely my choice based on my interests and skills. Other ambassadors may focus more on PowerPoint, video, hands-on activities, and sky observations.

If you live in the United States and are interested in becoming a JPL Solar System Ambassador, September is the only time you can apply, so act now! You certainly don't have to be an engineer, scientist, or teacher, though many ambassadors do have such backgrounds (many are also amateur astronomers). The main thing is that you have an active interest in space exploration and that you enjoy sharing your interests with other people, often but not always children.

NASA Historical Photo Collection

2010-09-02T22:04:00.000-04:00

NASA has a huge collection of photos related to space exploration and history - perhaps too many to conveniently explore considering the many NASA web sites, although there are some "greatest hits" sites such as Great Images in NASA (GRIN). But these days photo galleries are also social media, since people like to share and comment on photos. So NASA has been putting photos out on Flickr (e.g., JWST, JPL, and GSFC). Here's a cool new one, "NASA On the Commons." It's only 180 photos right now, a really random-seeming collection of historical photos, from Freedom 7 to space center construction photos to a "Moon fest" at NASA Ames in 2009. There are also some pre-NASA photos of people for whom NASA centers have been named, including one of my local heroes, Dr. Robert Goddard (GSFC). The one shown here shows Goddard in 1925 with his first liquid-fueled rocket.

My Other Car is a Saab?

2010-08-31T17:02:00.000-04:00

I'll have to run this by my wife, but it seems like a great deal. We've got a Prius and a Volvo - how about a 1964 Saab in great condition? A mach 2 Saab J35 "Draken" jet interceptor, that is. I saw this in a video news item on Yahoo. It's a sweet ride and an amazing bargain at $175,000 (you can't even get a new Cessna 172 for that) but it is something of a gas guzzler for a Swedish vehicle (about $5000 of jet fuel for 10 minutes of supersonic flight). I'm sure it's much more economical if you stay off the afterburner.

There are also some intermediate hurdles if I'm going to take advantage of this deal. First I'll have to get current on my private pilot certificate (single engine propeller aircraft only) and medical. Then I'd have to get an instrument rating and probably a commercial pilot certificate too. Then I'd have to get some jet training and probably get type certified in a two-seat jet of similar performance (maybe someone in the world has a two seat Draken you can get checked out in - the one for sale in Stockton, CA is a single seater). By the time I do all that, John Travolta will have bought it and flown it home.

Packing for Mars

2010-08-29T20:02:00.001-04:00

When I was ten years old (in 1963), I had a plan for my life. After high school, I would go to the US Air Force Academy, followed by flight training (jets, of course). Later I would go to test pilot school with the ultimate goal of becoming an astronaut. I was too young for Apollo (and for Vietnam as an officer and pilot), but if it had worked out, I would have been an Air Force pilot in the late 70's and astronaut-ready by the mid-80's. The plan fell apart when I was 12 and started to develop severe myopia. The Air Force Academy and flight training wouldn't allow corrective lenses (of course even if I had 20/10 "Yeagervision" there are any number of other things that could have killed my plan, but hey, it was a fun plan while it lasted).

At that time, the idea of space flight represented nothing but sheer excitement, but now that I've read the new book Packing for Mars (by Mary Roach, subtitled "The Curious Science of Life in the Void"), I understand better than ever that the astronaut's life is much more complicated and less enjoyable than you might imagine. Maybe this wasn't the life for me. Of course I knew this at some level from a lot of previous reading about space flight, but with the exception of some astronaut memoirs (especially Mike Mullane's down-and-dirty Riding Rockets), they don't go into much detail on the discomforts and inconveniences of space flight. Mary Roach does, and she does so with a writing style that is informative, colorful, personal, and often downright hilarious. I was laughing out loud at least once in every chapter. Her writing style often reminds me of Bill Bryson. She explains things clearly, but emphasizes quirky details and people. While the situations are often funny, she obviously respects the people and the work they do, so it never comes across as snarky - she's often laughing with the astronauts, cosmonauts, and other space workers.

Of course she covers the required "going to the bathroom in space," but she also covers the psychology of isolation and confinement, general problems of zero-G (including bone loss and vomiting), crash testing (with cadavers!), animal testing, Earth-based mission simulations, hygiene, and the ever-intriguing questions of sex in space. On the latter topic, she isn't able to come up with any hard evidence (sorry) that it has happened, but you can't say her research wasn't thorough. Considering that someone might have "done it" in a zero-G parabolic test flight, she tracks down and watches an obscure porn movie that was rumored to have had one scene shot on such a flight. She uses a fluid dynamics argument (sort of) to conclude that while the scene may have been shot in an airplane, it was not shot in zero-G. Read the book for more. You will also learn some interesting things about dolphin behavior and anatomy, since these marine mammals have to deal with some of the same issues as zero-G astronaut couples might encounter.

The author interviewed astronauts, cosmonauts, and all sorts of researchers, and her field trips included a flight on the "vomit comet" (she didn't vomit, thanks to "good drugs" they give you) and a trip to Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic, where NASA conducts simulated lunar and Mars missions in a remote, desolate, cratered environment that's about as close as you can get to Moon or Mars terrain on Earth. NASA and the US astronauts seemed to be the most "uptight," and the Russian cosmonauts the most frank in describing uncomfortable stuff. One exception was Jim Lovell, who was was unusually open, especially when she asked him about Gemini 7, in which he had spent two bathing-free weeks in the tiny Gemini cabin with Frank Borman, who apparently could be a rather cranky and difficult guy. Lovell proved he was brave enough for Apollo 13 by spending some 23 days in space with Borman (Gemini 7 and Apollo 8 - Borman was sick most of the time on Apollo 8, though it wasn't admitted at the time - so perhaps a bit of crankiness could be forgiven).

I read the Kindle version of the book, and I found it was valuable (and funny) to read most of the footnotes, which required a "click" for each one. Some of the funniest comments are in the footnotes. A very good book, even if you're not especially interested in space.

More HD Space Exploration

2010-08-29T12:50:00.002-04:00

I'm still infatuated with HDTV, Blu-Ray, and streaming high quality movies over the internet. I'm not planning to buy a lot of Blu-Ray discs since there is so much content available on cable and online (not to mention a lot of DVD's I own that now look substantially better). But I did want to have a few "demo discs" including a couple of space-related ones.

One that I bought was "For All Mankind," a 1989 theatrical-release documentary that collects many of the best segments of NASA film from the Apollo era into a single "meta-moon-mission." As director Al Reinert explains in the making-of feature, all the Apollo missions pretty much followed the same script, so why not use the best film from each mission? He even went as far as to use some Gemini footage (mainly Ed White's EVA) because it was just gorgeous, in part because the Gemini missions' earth orbits were much higher than the Apollo, shuttle, or ISS orbits, so you could get a much better sense of the roundness of our planet. He also used some of NASA's "engineering film" including the famous shot of Saturn V stage separation shot from the separating boosters. Since these were film cameras, the film had to be recovered, which was quite a trick. Each camera would eject its film canister housed in a small re-entry vehicle equipped with parachutes and a radio homing beacon. On-station USAF C-130's with special aerial recovery equipment would home on these beacons and snatch the parachutes from the air (a technique that had been developed to recover Corona "spy satellite" film in the early 60's). The narration consists mainly of comments by the Apollo astronauts, recorded by Reinert in audio-only interviews. The Blu-Ray transfer is awesome - it was probably 16 mm film in most cases, but the quality is quite impressive, especially in the scenes of lunar rendezvous with the LM silhouetted against the lunar surface.

I also watched the new Blu-Ray copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey, much of it with the audio commentary by actors Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood. The film-like quality of the 1080p display is gorgeous and highlights Kubrick's great attention to detail in every aspect of this film. The spacecraft models are amazing. Dullea did some of his own stunts in this film, and he talks about one scene that was just wild, entering the emergency hatch when HAL famously refuses to open the pod-bay doors (here's a three-minute clip of the scene). In his haste to try to save "Frank," "Dave" had forgotten his helmet and gloves, making an EVA into the emergency airlock just a bit dicey.

The pod's door and outer airlock door were on the ceiling of a two-story set, with Dullea falling toward the camera positioned on the inner airlock door (on the floor) when he was supposedly ejected from the pod by pressurized air (this was why a stunt double wasn't used - his face was rushing towards the camera). He was suspended by a heavy rope, the other end of which was handled by a circus trapeze performer who weighed more than Dullea (a critical point). There were knots in the rope to signal the stopping points, and when the first knot reached him, the circus guy stopped the rope (preventing Dullea's face from impacting the camera) and then jumped off a platform with the rope attached to his foot, using his weight to suddenly yank Dullea back toward the outer airlock door (and ceiling of the set!) where he could use the emergency airlock close handle. It was done in one take, and it really looks like this takes place in zero-G. Dullea must have had total faith in Kubrick and that circus performer! An amazing scene in an amazing movie.

U2 and NASA, Space 2009

2010-08-28T11:39:00.000-04:00

This very cool video showed up today in an email update from Space-Multimedia. I'm something of a U2 fan (I saw them live once, back in 1994), but I didn't realize that they had cooperated with NASA for some events during their 2009 tour, including live video feeds with ISS astronauts and with "space tourist" Guy Laliberté (founder of Cirque du Soleil and "the first clown in space," as Bono calls him).

Apollo 13 Revisited

2010-08-22T17:24:00.001-04:00

My first HDTV and Blu-Ray player provided the (de?)motivation for a lazy, movie-watching weekend. I had to try out all the different parts of my new toys, including a WiFi connection that allows access to various internet-based services, some free (Pandora internet radio, YouTube), some not free (Netflix, Amazon Video On Demand). I ordered a Blu-Ray copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey from Amazon (mostly because it was only $8.99), but it won't arrive until next week. In the meantime, Amazon provides a free VOD rental of the film, but unfortunately not the HD version. I watched a little to see how the WiFi connection would work (quite well), but decided to wait for the Blu-Ray disc to watch the whole thing later this week. I've bought 2001 on VHS and DVD and now Blu-Ray. It's a space classic and a home video test case, I guess. With Blu-Ray and a 42 inch 1080p screen, it may start to approach the original movie experience of 1968 (which I barely remember, though I know I made my mother take me to see it).

The one BD that I bought and received so far is a BBC nature show, Nature's Most Amazing Events, and the action, scenery, cinematography, and visual quality did not disappoint. The new Blu-Ray player also does a nice job "upconverting" DVD's so I watched a couple of old favorites, Memphis Belle and Apollo 13. I have the 2-disc anniversary edition of Apollo 13, but for some reason I had never watched the making-of special or listened to Jim and Marilyn Lovell's commentary, both great. I really love that movie, both for the many authentic details of the Apollo era and for the emotional intensity. 13 was to be the fifth manned lunar voyage and the third landing, and the public and the media in 1970 had already come to think of it as routine (e.g., the networks didn't interrupt prime time to televise the crew's live color TV "en route to the moon" broadcast - that was so 1969!). But of course the oxygen tank explosion soon made it anything but routine, and the drama of three astronauts' lives hanging by a thread in the "LM lifeboat" captured the world's attention for almost a week. Riveting stuff even though you know the ending.

The making-of special shows what a great combination Tom Hanks and Ron Howard were for this film. Hanks was a space fanatic and astronaut wannabe. Howard wasn't so much, but he is a fanatic for detail and authenticity (technical and emotional) in all of his films. The fact that they were able to get NASA's cooperation to film parts of the film in sets installed in the KC-135 "vomit comet" was an amazing coup and added tremendously to the you-are-there feeling. All that filming had to be done in 30 second segments as the zero-G training jet flew parabolas over and over. All of the "whole body" shots were done this way, but in many scenes where only the actors' heads or torsos were visible, they had to mime the zero-G effects by swaying their bodies to simulate it. It all looks real to me!

I'm sure I will quickly recalibrate my technology "normal meter" so in a couple of weeks, HDTV will just be routine, and I'll go back to not watching much TV. This happens with all technology (except the iPod Touch - I use it extensively every day, and it still amazes me). But I'm glad it's giving me a reason to revisit some space favorites like Apollo 13 and 2001.

Space Models!

2010-08-10T22:08:00.008-04:00

The moon landings were not faked, but if they were, this guy could have been one of the model builders. OK, maybe not (he says he was only 10 in 1968, and he's French), but he has built some pretty nice space models. I don't know exactly how I found his site, but it's got some pretty amazing stuff. I was an avid model builder in my youth (from maybe age 8 to 15), focused mainly on military aircraft, though I did build a few space models too (long since gone - I remember an especially nice Saturn V and a very large Gemini, possibly the original version of this Revell 1/24 scale model). I was pretty good for a kid modeler, though I didn't have the patience to do really fine painting or to custom-build special details. I pretty much built and painted according to the instructions.

I haven't looked at all the models on M. Meens' web site, but my favorite has to be his recently completed 1/24 scale model of the Lunar Module ascent stage shown above and at left. This thing is a work of art - just beautiful. He has quite a few photos showing the fine detail, but my favorite is the cutaway view shown above. I have seen many illustrations and 3D representations of the LM over the years, including the real full-size one (exterior view only, below right) at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington.

I've also seen life size cutaway mock-ups of the LM flight deck (at KSC and other places) and I've spent hours in the the 3D virtual cockpit of the AMSO LM in Orbiter (flying simulated moon landings, of course). But this two-section view of this 1/24 scale model gives the best impression I've ever felt of the nature and size of the tiny LM cockpit. Very cool.

The web site also includes some models and drawings of the Soviet N1-L3 moon rocket (which failed in all tests). The models (N1 vs. Saturn V) are great and at one time were on display at Cite de l'Espace in Toulouse, which I recently visited (I didn't see them). In addition, there is a beautifully drawn (by Serge Gracieux of Cite de l'Espace) set of "story board" images depicting what the Soviet N1-L3 moon landing mission would have been like if it had succeeded in 1969. The mission had some similarities to Apollo, but only cosmonaut would have landed the "LK" on the moon (shown above), while one other would have remained in lunar orbit until the ascent section of the lander rendezvoused for return to Earth. There were no docking ports planned, so the landing cosmonaut would have to transfer to and from the LK by EVA.

UPDATE: This video is from a Japanese modeler who did a superb customized job building a 1965 Revell 1/24 scale Gemini Spacecraft (the one I had back in the 60's). The video starts with some space scenes with the Apollo 8 transmission of Genesis (December 1968), and a series of stills showing the model building procedure starts around 0:34. The gold foil on the back end of equipment module (from a candy bar wrapper!) is an especially nice touch. Finished model shown below. Very impressive.

Why Moon Landings Were Not Faked

2010-08-02T12:38:00.001-04:00

I found this brief video clip through a Universe Today post from last week, but I just love it, so I have to post it here too. It's one of the few "space related" things that I find myself sharing widely with "civilians" (i.e., friends and relatives who care nothing about space, also called "normal people"). And it's just so funny, I've watched it five or six times myself.

Admittedly this video is more about humor than space, but it does address something that has always puzzled me about moon landing conspiracy "theorists." Between 1962 and 1972, NASA's budget totaled about $260 billion (in 2007 dollars). Much of that was spent on the Apollo program, ostensibly to send astronauts into Earth orbit (11 times, since all the moon missions first orbited the Earth) and later to the moon (nine times with six successful landings - the others were the two planned orbital missions and Apollo 13 which flew once around the moon and back to Earth). According to Moon hoax fans, if this money was spent at all, it was spent on faking the moon landings through an elaborate conspiracy involving thousands of government and contractor employees. These people supposedly built a lot of real-looking but non-functional hardware (plenty of civilians saw the hardware) and applied amazingly advanced special effects technology to produce thousands of photographs as well as many hours of film footage, video, and audio recordings (including radio transmissions that seemed to come from the moon - though of course NASA also controlled the tracking antennas, so who knows?). They also produced a lot of scientific data and a few hundred kilograms of "moon rocks" (which could have come from Hawaii or someplace, right?).

That's all well and good, the joke's on us and all, but what about the Saturn V rockets? Thousands of people witnessed the launch of thirteen gigantic rockets in Florida from 1967 to 1973. Flames came out, loud noises, something went into the sky. Where did they go (some did go only into Earth orbit for tests and to launch the Skylab space station in 1973)? Well maybe the conspiracy people will allow that NASA can put things into Earth orbit. Are they still up there? Did they burn up and reenter the Earth's atmosphere? Wouldn't someone have noticed this? Or did they go to the moon, but without astronauts? Was NASA good enough to do that, but not to land and return the astronauts?

It's all so ridiculous, of course, and if you are in the conspiracy frame of mind, you can always come up with additional things that could have been faked to conceal the other fakes. But why thirteen Saturn V's? And why six "faked" landings (plus Apollo 13 which was aborted)? Why not just launch two or three Saturn V's (to prove you're testing them, of course) and then one successful faked landing? Then declare "mission accomplished, JFK honored, Soviets beaten" and spend the rest of the money on planes and bombs for Vietnam?

Recently the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has sent back pictures of the Apollo landing sites. But who controls LRO? NASA of course. No doubt the conspiracy continues to this day. And there is no way to convince the conspiracy faithful, of course. But we can have a good laugh about it once in a while, as with the video that triggered this whole rant!

When Ideas Have Sex

2010-07-28T11:20:00.000-04:00

Following up on my July 5 post reviewing Matt Ridley's book Rational Optimism, here's a 17 minute TED talk in which Mr. Ridley presents the gist of his ideas on the importance of "exchange" (of goods, services, and ideas) in the development of the "collective brain" we call human civilization. Very nicely done.

The Future Is Creeping Up On Us

2010-07-14T23:29:00.001-04:00

Recently the New York Times has been running a special series of articles called "Smarter Than You Think" (a series examining the recent advances in artificial intelligence and robotics and their potential impact on society). Machines are starting to take some real giant steps. I've always been interested in AI and even considered making a career change in the mid-eighties when "expert systems" were making a splash. Fortunately I stayed with optics, because AI per se never became an industry or a field of its own outside of research labs. Which is not to say that there hasn't been progress in AI - just that people kept moving the bar. Things that used to be considered nearly impossible for machines (like speech recognition) were developed and folded into software engineering. In other words, if machines are doing it, it ain't intelligent. AI stays just over the horizon.

So beating grand masters at chess? That's been done by an IBM supercomputer with a lot of special programming and coaching. So it's not AI, just brute force. But what if a few of those IBM supercomputers got together and started to compete with humans on the game show Jeopardy, with its wide-ranging subject matter and tricky word-play clues? That would be impressive, right? Well, according to the first article in the series, it's still more or less brute force, though when the software is playing Jeopardy in real time, with no internet connection (but with a huge local database of "general knowledge") and often beating human champions of the show, that seems pretty smart to me no matter what sort of statistical inferencing, data mining, or number crunching is going on behind the scenes (things are pretty messy up in our own "wetware" too). There may be a televised human vs. AI Jeopardy tournament later this year.

Of course Jeopardy is still pretty narrow, and the bar keeps moving. Speech recognition is good enough for many customer service tasks now, but still nowhere near humans in flexibility and generality. But it's getting better, even if "Bina48" comes across as something of a whack job in her (its?) interview. There are robots designed be cuddly and emotionally supportive (they look like baby seals). There are robots who are learning to be teachers. It's all pretty mind-boggling even if you've read a lot of SF and future-looking non-fiction.

There's also ASIMO, Honda's experimental humanoid robot, shown in the video above. A cute little robot kid who can walk, climb stairs, and even run (I saw a demonstration at Disneyland back in February - really impressive, especially the stairs). Honda has been working on this bipedal robot assistant for some 20 years and it's not ready for the general home quite yet - but it's getting closer. I'm really more optimistic than creeped out by the growing robot population. I think they will ultimately lead to better lives for many humans, though as with any technology, they will also displace some humans' jobs along the way. We really need to work on that.

And I haven't even mentioned NASA's Robonaut who will soon be living on the ISS. More on that another time...

Pocket Solar System

2010-07-11T11:33:00.002-04:00

There are a number of great astronomy and space apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and I've discussed some of them here before. I just got a new one called Solar Walk - 3D Solar System (it's "3D" because it actually supports red/green 3D glasses for some images, though I didn't find this to be very exciting on the iPod Touch). Although it's easy to tool around the solar system in Orbiter (free space flight simulator for Windows), Solar Walk is available in my pocket and is better for certain "big picture" questions about the solar system.

Case in point: the recent prominent alignment of Venus, Mars, and Saturn in the early evening western sky. Here's a screen shot from Star Map on the iPod Touch showing their positions this evening around 19:40 local time:

Why are they showing up that way? If you launch Solar Walk and touch the little orbital diagram icon, you can pull up an interactive "orrery" that shows the correct relative positions of the planets in their orbits for any given date and time. Here it is for this evening at about the same time as the above sky shot:

So you can see how this apparent alignment occurs from the positions of Venus, Mars, and Saturn in their orbits (of course the sizes of the planets and orbits in this diagram view are not correct - they need to be visible on the small display - but the angular positions are correct). Solar Walk also lets you zoom in on the planets and their moons - enough to see the main features of each planet, though not very close up. There is also a fair amount of information on each body and on the spacecraft that have visited it as in this screen about Saturn:

There's nothing right now on dwarf planets and asteroids, but what it has is really useful for understanding and explaining what is happening with the main members of our solar system.

Sweet, Rosetta!

2010-07-10T17:46:00.000-04:00

ESA's Rosetta spacecraft today made its closest approach to the asteroid 21 Lutetia and ESA has posted some high-res images but so far no captions. I think this one with Saturn in the distance is very cool. I played around a bit with a cool Rosetta add-on for Orbiter back in 2007 and 2008. The screen shot below shows an unrealistically close simulated pass (43 km!) of asteroid Steins which actually took place in 2008. Steins is located in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, as is Lutetia, but Lutetia is a much bigger asteroid, about 100 km in diameter, the largest one yet to be visited by a spacecraft. The Steins encounter took place during Rosetta’s first incursion into the main asteroid belt while on its way to visit Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. You could certainly say that Rosetta gets around.

Two Amazing Albums

2010-07-10T16:13:00.001-04:00

I stumbled on two amazing albums recently, Broken Bells and "Gorilla Manor" by Local Natives. They are similar in that they are "alternative rock" (whatever that is) with excellent (and eclectic) songwriting, cool arrangements, and great vocals. Both were MP3 specials on Amazon (Broken Bells for $5, Local Natives for $2.99 as the MP3 Daily Deal on July 7). I hear so many connections in this music - with echoes of the 60's, the Police, Peter Gabriel, the Shins, and much more. The Shins reference is not coincidental in the case of Broken Bells since it is a collaboration between "Danger Mouse" (of Gorillaz and many other projects) and James Mercer, singer/guitarist for the Shins.

Great stuff. I've had these two on continuous shuffle on my iPod for the last few days. My favorite Broken Bells songs are "Mongrel Heart" and "The Ghost Inside." Top two for Local Natives would be "Wide Eyes" and the wonderful "Sun Hands" - I just love that song.

Space Carnivals 160 & 161

2010-07-10T15:52:00.000-04:00

I've missed a lot of space carnivals in the last few busy months. But I'm starting to catch up and to even write and submit some space-related posts again. Carnival 160 launched on June 27 at David Portree's Beyond Apollo blog. Carnival 161 arrived on July 8 in two versions: traditional text and YouTube video (embedded here). Nice job by Habitation Intention!

Dare to be an optimist!

2010-07-05T16:52:00.002-04:00

This is a little embarrassing, but right now, right in front of you, millions of ideas are having sex. They might be having it right inside this blog. I know, freaky, right? According to author Matt Ridley, the secret of humans' success is exchange, and while trade in physical objects is a big part of that, the exchange of ideas is really the thing that has kept this whole civilization thing moving forward for the last 10,000 years or so, and especially in the last 200 years. And when it comes to ideas having sex, the Internet is the ultimate "swingers' club."

Ridley's book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves is quite a bit more serious than that first paragraph makes it sound, but it does describe a key point. He says, "Without trade, innovation just does not happen. Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution. It stimulates novelty." Another key thing that exchange and trade allow is specialization. Self-sufficiency sounds good in theory (and in practice if you are in a basic survival situation), but when it comes to growth, prosperity, and happiness (all closely linked), specialization means more of everything for everybody. If multiple people in a community have different skills and products, and if exchange is allowed, everyone has the potential to benefit from the knowledge and output of everyone else. Ideas are especially valuable in part because sharing an idea is like lighting a candle for someone else - now you both have a lighted candle (or an idea of how to do something better). When knowledge is shared in a community, it becomes something like a "collective brain." And when the community expands to include the entire world, interconnected by vast transportation networks and with the Internet as its central nervous system, you can have the wild orgy of exchange of ideas, goods, and services that we call the modern world.

Ridley spends most of the book in a chronological journey through the development of civilization, from the first inklings of exchange and specialization some 200,000 years ago (when we really diverged from other species including our close cousins the apes), through expanded barter systems, to the development of agriculture some 10,000 years ago. Of course climate stability had a lot to do with that as well, but an interesting point is that trade is what really made agriculture interesting and worthwhile. There was also the development of energy sources, from human power (including slavery, unfortunately), to animal power, to various forms of "current solar" energy (water power, wind power, burning wood, etc.), to various forms of "stored solar" (coal, oil, natural gas). There are more steps, but it's clear that the modern world is based to a great extent on exchange and specialization, including free trade and the free exchange of ideas. These have in turn produced a wide range of innovations in social systems and technology and led to the astounding prosperity that most (but of course not all) people in the world enjoy today. Ridley points out that while Louis XIV used some 498 servants to prepare his meals, a modern person of average means has many more people working for him or her (mostly indirectly and on a shared basis) to make easily available food, clothing, medicines, transportation, entertainment, and everything else that we take for granted in modern life. In this sense the average person today is richer than a king in the seventeenth century.

But if things are so great and getting better all the time, why are so many people so pessimistic about the present and the future? Ridley doesn't have a good explanation for this, though he knows he's fighting from a minority position (optimists must be naive!), and he shows that it has always been so. People were fretting over "peak coal" in 1830, and convinced that things had improved so much in the previous half century that there could be no place to go but down. But of course the rest of the nineteenth century was in fact a golden age of technological and social development. Things like slavery and child labor declined not so much because people became nicer, but because energy sources and manufacturing methods made them less necessary (or you could say affordable to give up).

The Rational Optimist is not really an ideological work. While there is a strong sense that Ridley believes that markets generally work better than governments (especially corrupt governments like many in Africa), he's not saying that governments are not necessary. He's certainly a strong proponent for free trade and individual rights, which are strongly correlated with a sense of well-being or "happiness." He also believes that things will continue to get better, even for Africa, as long as we keep moving forward in terms of trade and openness. Although anything can happen including terrorism, crazy governments, natural disasters, etc., his optimism is based on considerations of history and of how things really work (and especially on how resourceful people are), not on wishful thinking or on some belief that prosperity is humanity's right or destiny. It's more or less what we do.

I personally tend toward optimism myself, and this book has given me a lot to think about including many reasons for optimism that I hadn't thought about before. I highly recommend this book.